Copyright

Copyright © 2017 by Caroline Susanne Jenkins

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Designed by Amy Quinn

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jenkins, Carrie, author.

Title: What love is : and what it could be / Carrie Jenkins.
Description: New York : Basic Books [2017]
Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers:
LCCN 2016019598| ISBN 9780465098859 (HC) | ISBN 9780465098866 (EB)
Subjects: LCSH: Love--Philosophy.
Classification: LCC BD436 .J46 2017 | DDC 128/.46--dc23 LC record available
at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016019598

E3-20161219-JV-NF
 Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue On Being a Philosopher in Love (Maybe)

Introduction
Chapter 1 Love Is Biology
Chapter 2 Love Is Society
Chapter 3 Gems at the Garage Sale: Philosophers on Love
Chapter 4 Love Is as Love Does: Love’s Dual Nature
Chapter 5 Under Construction: Love’s Changing Role
Chapter 6 What Needs to Change
Chapter 7 It’s Love, Jim, but Not as We Know It: The Future (via the Past)
Coda Make It So

Acknowledgments
Praise for WHAT LOVE IS
Notes
Index
About the Author
For philosophy with love.
P.S. We need to talk.
 Prologue:
On Being a Philosopher in Love (Maybe)

I am a philosopher. I am also a human being. These aren’t wholly separable

aspects of my self—they are intimately connected. They inform and shape each
other. How I love influences how I think, and how I think influences how I love.
I’m not unusual in this regard. Anyone who sets out to think about love comes to
the task with a bundle of personal experiences. Whether good or bad,
stereotypical or subversive, our experiences inform our thinking. And there is
nothing wrong with that—which is lucky, really, as there’s certainly no escaping
it! We just need to be aware that it happens.
On the mornings when I walk from my boyfriend’s apartment to the home I
share with my husband, I sometimes find myself reflecting on the disconnects
between my own experiences with romantic love and the way romantic love is
normally understood in the time and place in which I live (Vancouver, Canada,
in 2016). Sometimes this starts out in my mind as a replay of an awkward
conversation, one of those where someone’s asked me a perfectly innocent
question—“So how do you two know each other?”—and unwittingly forced me
to choose between giving a deceptive answer and providing what I know will be
too much information.
If I tell the truth—“He’s my boyfriend”—to people who know me and my
husband, it’s inevitably going to cause embarrassment—the kind of
embarrassment that comes with suddenly being made to acknowledge the
existence of something awkward, something abnormal, something that makes
people feel icky. Deceptive answers—“Oh, he used to work in the office upstairs
from mine”—are easy and comfortable.
And it turns out, it’s alarmingly easy to be dishonest while saying true things.
He really did work in the office upstairs from mine; that just isn’t how we met.
In fact we never met in person until we noticed each other on the dating website
OKCupid. When I am tired or nervous, when I don’t know the person I’m
talking to very well, or when I just don’t feel like explaining myself again, I take
the easy way out. I give the deceptive answer.
But philosophy doesn’t let me take the easy way out of hard questions.
Living in this cultural context, I’m routinely reminded that successful, mature,
romantic love—the stuff of movies, pop songs, Valentine’s Day cards, and fairy
tales—is supposed to be monogamous. So the question is forced on me: What is
this thing that I’m doing? Is it love? Is it romantic love?
Philosophy is my day job, and I know a philosophical question when I see
one. But reading the philosophical literature on love hasn’t, on the whole, been
much help to me. Philosophers often assume monogamy without question. Some
even treat monogamy as definitive of romantic love: a characterizing feature that
distinguishes it from other kinds of love.1 No doubt these philosophers are
guided by their own experiences, which create and sustain their baseline
assumptions. But philosophy no more allows our baseline assumptions to pass
unchallenged than it lets us take the easy way out of hard questions.
If indeed romantic love must be monogamous, then I am making some kind
of mistake when I say, “I’m in love with you”—meaning romantically—to both
my partners. I am not lying, because I am genuinely trying to be as honest as I
can. But if romantic love requires monogamy, then despite my best intentions,
what I’m saying at those moments is not, strictly speaking, true.
The question of whether what I say is true is complicated, not least because
the nature of love is a vague and messy business. Answers are not going to
appear neatly tied up with a heart-shaped bow. We can and should trace out the
broad-brush contours of love, but if we go looking for sharp edges—a tidy,
simple theory—we are bound to be disappointed. Trying to state the nature of
romantic love with precision is like trying to nail some Jell-O to a wall made of
Jell-O, using a Jell-O nail.
But the question is complicated for another reason as well. Romantic love is
in the process of changing. And I don’t just mean that attitudes toward love are
changing, although that’s also true. I’ll unpack these ideas over the course of the
book. For now, though, suffice it to say that I think the norm of monogamy could
be one of the features in flux. We are creating space in our ongoing cultural
conversations to question the universal norm of monogamous love, just as we
previously created space to question the universal norm of hetero love.
Just having the words to describe something is an important first step in
opening up that space. A word for honest, nonmonogamous, loving relationships,
“polyamory,” came into circulation during the late twentieth century. Since the
1990s, the Internet has also greatly facilitated the exploration of polyamory and
other forms of ethical nonmonogamy (as distinct from cheating and other
unethical behaviors). This has made it infinitely easier for those who wanted to
explore nonmonogamy to find like-minded partners, communities, and
information. Over the same period, researchers have begun to work on
understanding the stigma attached to violations of the monogamy norm, while
activists and advocates have begun to work on ending that stigma and providing
practical information and support to people whose families or jobs are at risk
because of prejudice surrounding their nonmonogamous relationships.
One can track the effects of all this in various cultural barometers. Dan
Savage, one of the world’s most famous (and controversial) sex and relationship
advice columnists, is one such barometer. Over the last few years, Savage has
started to take the possibility of mature, successful nonmonogamous romantic
love very seriously, having previously been something of a doubting Thomas on
the question of whether people in poly “marriages” ever made it to their third
anniversary.2 Themes and questions related to modern polyamory have also
started to appear at the more thoughtful end of mass media. In the Spike Jonze
movie Her, for instance, a computer operating system claims to be in love with
641 people. She attempts to explain to one human lover that “the heart’s not like
a box that gets filled up. It expands in size the more you love.”
It’s too early to say where this conversation will go. I think romantic love
might expand to include nonmonogamous love as part of a general trend toward
greater inclusion. It’s not that a norm of nonmonogamy would replace the norm
of monogamy (any more than a norm of nonheterosexuality is replacing the
norm of heterosexuality). Rather, the scope of what counts as romantic love
would become more inclusive. But I don’t see this future as a done deal. It’s not
even as close to being a done deal as the inclusion of nonhetero love. And all
this means that I am unsure whether nonmonogamous love is really romantic
love—whether being “in love” in that sense with two people is really possible,
here and now.
I think love can make room for nonmonogamy. But, of course, I am biased.
(Then again, everyone is biased.) Perhaps it would be safer to say that I hope
love can make room for nonmonogamy. A more inclusive picture of love would
make better sense of what’s happened in my own life than the image I grew up
with, which made romantic love the property of straight monogamous couples
only.
In any case, I am prepared to bet that, from a biological perspective, what’s
happening in my brain looks the way romantic love is supposed to look. In fact,
it’s partly for that reason that I think romantic love could accommodate
nonmonogamous love. Romantic love has a long history of breaking free from
social constraints, and biology has played a part in that. But the interplay
between love’s constraints and its freedoms is complicated, as is the interplay
between love’s biology and its social profile.
On those mornings walking home, I came to realize that in order to
understand whether I was in love or not, I’d have to work on untangling some of
these complications. I couldn’t think of a better approach to the problem than to
search for an answer to the philosophical question, What is romantic love? (This
is what I meant when I said philosophy doesn’t let me take the easy way out!)
My efforts developed into this book. But the project quickly outgrew its original
purpose of helping me figure out whether I was “in love.” It has ended up being
all kinds of other things I never anticipated. This isn’t a book about
nonmonogamy per se—although it sprang partly from questions I have about
that. Love turns out to be philosophically fascinating for all kinds of reasons I
could never have imagined. This is a short book, but even so, it’ll take us into
the realms of medicine, magic, queerness, wisdom, dopamine, gender, Romans,
rainbows, rationality, Sappho, soul mates, politics, and, of course, human nature.
Buckle up!
Eventually this book became an exploration of possibility: what love could
be, not just what it is. I ended up with a theory that makes romantic love partly
(but not entirely) a social construct. The social aspect of romantic love changes
over time, but social change is often slow, especially when it comes to something
so invested with value and significance as love. Change doesn’t happen
overnight, and a single individual can’t bring it about. That said, some changes
happen quickly enough to be visible in the course of a lifetime, and we do live in
interesting times in this regard.
I often wonder what it would take for one particular change—the inclusion of
nonmonogamous love as “normal”—to happen. It would have to become
unsurprising to see a romantic comedy that ends with a happy romantic
relationship among three people or to hear a pop song about the trials of
navigating simultaneous open relationships. In other words, becoming included
is a numbers game. Exposure to just one example of successful nonmonogamous
love may be enough to challenge prejudices.* But it would take exposure to
many and varied examples for nonmonogamous love to start to become an
acknowledged “normal” option. I don’t see this happening anytime soon,
although I would be happy to be proved wrong.
 In this book you will find my theory of what love is and what it could be. It’s
a theory that explains why representation in mass media is so important to
“nontraditional” love and why we encounter such visceral resistance from the
people who want to keep it off our screens and out of the minds of “the
children.” The crux of the matter is that the representation of romantic love in
our cultural products is no mere shadow, or reflection, of what love is. What we
see on our screens, hear on our radios, and read in our magazines is actually part
of the process of constructing love: making love what it is. These acts of
representation are part of how we collectively create and sustain the contours of
romantic love’s social profile.
The stakes are high. And I’m personally invested, as are you. Just as we all
bring our experiences with us, and just as we are all biased, we are all personally
invested. Nobody is agenda-free, and there’s no “view from nowhere” when it
comes to love. It’s just that when your “view from somewhere” isn’t one of the
“normal” ones, you are forcibly and frequently reminded of its existence.
For a philosopher, these reminders of one’s own perspective are invaluable
(which is not to say they’re always nice). Calling ourselves objective doesn’t
make us any less biased (in fact, there is some evidence that it may make us
more so).3 Being “normal” doesn’t mean you have no perspective and no
baggage, although it does mean you’re less likely to notice these things. In any
case, we can’t make genuine philosophical progress on the hard questions by
stuffing our personal baggage behind the sofa of “objectivity” and hoping
nobody looks there. The best we can do is to try to maximize our awareness of
whatever it is we’re bringing along for the ride.
 Introduction

This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy

indeed has no other origin, and he was a good genealogist who made
Iris the daughter of Thaumas.
—Plato, Theaetetus1

My day job as a philosophy professor consists of thinking, writing, and talking

about, as well as teaching, philosophy. I have been a professional philosopher for
ten years; before that, I studied philosophy for seven years. Those seventeen
years comprise my entire adult life. But as is the case for many people, my
childhood was full of philosophy too; I just didn’t know it was called
“philosophy” back then. Like a lot of kids (until adults tell them to cut it out) I
asked questions about the nature of reality as soon as I could entertain them. I
wanted to know what existed, what the world was like, and what was possible.
When we wonder what love is, that’s part of the philosophical enterprise.
More specifically, it’s part of metaphysics: the ongoing project of trying to figure
out what is real, what the world is like, and what is possible. There is more
philosophy going on in people’s everyday lives than you might think. Is love
real? What is it like? What is possible in the realm of love? These are deep—and
old—metaphysical questions. And for a few years now, I’ve been captivated by
them. I never planned to work on love; I started my career thinking about the
philosophy of mathematics. But love snuck up on me and wouldn’t let me drop
it. The mind wants what it wants.
I’m particularly fascinated by romantic love. That’s not because I think other
kinds of love aren’t interesting or important—they certainly are. But our current
state of information has landed us with particular philosophical challenges and
puzzles when it comes to understanding the nature of romantic love. These
puzzles hit me in the heart first, but they quickly took root in my intellectual life
as well, connecting themselves in fascinating ways to the other philosophical
questions I work on. This part shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
Philosophically, it’s always been my experience that everything is connected to
everything else. (That’s part of why I love philosophy: a discipline where
nothing is, in principle, irrelevant.) As my thinking about love gradually drew in
ideas from other areas of philosophy, I was delighted to find they seemed to be
just what I needed to make better sense of love.
While the nature of romantic love is a perennial philosophical question, today
we are confronting new and immediate pressures to find answers. But doing so
can appear less feasible than ever because we also face some especially difficult
choices right now. In particular, we face a stark choice between treating romantic
love as a biological phenomenon and viewing it as a social or cultural product.
Wikipedia can be a surprisingly good gauge of situations like this. To some
extent, it tracks the pulse of our current state of public information. As of this
writing,2 the Wikipedia entry for “love” describes exactly the choice I have in
mind: “Biological models of love tend to see it as a mammalian drive, similar to
hunger or thirst. Psychology sees love as more of a social and cultural
phenomenon. Certainly love is influenced by hormones … and how people think
and behave in love is influenced by their conceptions of love.”
This is actually a great summary of the problem. Some leading theories of
love tell us it’s a biological phenomenon, while other leading theories (here
attributed to psychology but also coming to us from a number of other
disciplines) tell us it’s a social and cultural phenomenon. There seems to be at
least a grain—and perhaps much more than a grain—of truth in both pictures. I
believe we can build a philosophical theory that accommodates both the
biological and social natures of romantic love. It just takes some conceptual
work to see how it all fits together. But the intellectual, practical, and personal
payoffs are worth the effort.
Many philosophers of love treat it as a psychological or mental phenomenon,
often as an emotion of some kind. I don’t think this is the whole story, as we’ll
see. In any case, the philosophical problems that strike me as most urgent right
now have to do with untangling love’s biological and social aspects. So while
I’m not setting the psychology of love aside—it will keep popping up throughout
the book—I’ve set my sights on questions that point both within and beyond
psychology.

If the history of popular culture in the last half century is anything to go by,
questions about the nature of romantic love are very important. Several pop
songs and albums have “What Is Love?” as their exact titles; Haddaway’s 1993
power ballad is perhaps the best known (and my favorite). Then there are
variants like the Foreigner song “I Want to Know What Love Is” and the Cole
Porter show number “What Is This Thing Called Love?” There are many, many
more in the same vein. When a theme is this pronounced in popular culture, that
tells us something: we are seriously fascinated and confused by this thing called
“love.”
It’s worth pausing here to notice how often, in these songs and everywhere
else, people say “love” when they mean romantic love. That’s convenient
shorthand—but notice how it also suggests romantic love is accorded a special
place in our thinking. Anyhow, I’ll use it myself: unless I specify otherwise, you
can assume that “love” means romantic love throughout this book.
While this fascination with figuring love out is completely contemporary, it is
anything but new. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato was obsessed with love
of all kinds, not least the kind he called eros (“passionate love” or “desire”),
which he thought of as something that normally occurred between an older man
and a younger man. In Plato’s famous Symposium, the character Aristophanes
expounds a myth about soul mates that sounds like it might be an early theory of
romantic love. The story goes that once upon a time humans were a species of
two-headed, eight-limbed creatures. But they attracted the wrath of the gods, and
so to punish them Zeus split each creature in half. Some split into one woman
and one man; others split into either two women or two men. The nature of love,
according to this myth, is a striving to reunite with the person who is literally
one’s “other half.”
A much more modern storyteller, contemporary writer Simon Rich, says that
the Aristophanes myth leaves out “the vast majority of humans.” In his very
short story “The Children of the Dirt,”3 Rich calls the woman-woman pairs
“children of the earth,” the man-man pairs “children of the sun,” and the mixed
pairs “children of the moon.” But he goes on to say that there were also the
“children of the dirt,” who only ever had one head and four limbs. They did not
get split in half, because Zeus decided they were in enough trouble already.
Today, Rich writes, “the vast majority of humans are descendants of the children
of the dirt. And no matter how long they search the earth, they’ll never find what
they’re looking for because there’s nobody for them, not anybody in the world.”
It’s true that the Aristophanes myth ignores a lot of single people (both
miserable and contented ones). In another respect, though, it is striking to
modern ears how inclusive the myth is: the idea of a single creature splitting into
two women, two men, or one of each is an attempt to theorize same-sex love
right alongside opposite-sex love. We are only just catching up with the 2,000-
year-old methodological insight that this might be a good idea.
The myth of soul mates still makes for a great story, with or without Rich’s
modern addition. But nowadays we don’t give it much weight as a realistic
explanation of what love is. These days, instead of turning to myths and legends,
we look to our own modern oracle: Google. And Google, in turn, looks back,
watching what we ask for, tracking levels of public interest in “What is …”
questions. Unsurprisingly, “What is love?” is constantly at or near the top of the
list.4
This search for understanding is not simply a quest for intellectual
satisfaction, like solving a crossword. Not knowing what love is makes us deeply
vulnerable, because love matters: many people make their most significant life
choices on the basis of whether they’re in love (or think they are). Saying “I love
you” is a big deal, and it is worth making every effort to figure out what it
means. We can’t afford to risk talking past one another or being badly
misunderstood in some of the most important conversations of our lives.
And yet people routinely do take that kind of risk; they say “I love you”
without thinking—or talking—about what it means to say those words. In some
of the worst-case scenarios, as bell hooks has warned in her book All About
Love, unclarity about the nature of love can lead to mistaking abuse for love.5
Other people get through life—and love—just fine without thinking much about
what love is. But a little reflection would take some of the luck and risk out of
this situation.
And what does it say about modern life that so many people’s biggest
decisions are based on the imagined presence or absence of something so poorly
understood as romantic love? It means we have normalized two halves of a
situation that, when we stop to think about it, should not strike us as normal. On
the one hand, we’ve accepted the idea of love as a tremendously significant
social force: something that shapes and reshapes the entire trajectories of lives
and serves as a focal point for all kinds of values. Many of our most strongly
held personal, ethical, and political beliefs cluster around our attitudes toward
romantic love. (Think about it: you can learn an awful lot about someone’s
worldview by learning what kinds of love strike that person as normal, natural,
or valuable.)
On the other hand, we have simultaneously normalized the idea that love is a
mystery: something hard or impossible to comprehend. We as a society cannot
agree even on the fundamentals of what love is. In fact, we sometimes revel in or
glorify this very lack of understanding, as if incomprehensibility were actually
part of what is special or valuable about love. I call this phenomenon the
“romantic mystique.”
The idea of a “romantic mystique” takes inspiration from an older idea. In
1963, Betty Friedan noticed that people were simultaneously mystifying and
glorifying femininity; she called this the “feminine mystique,” the idea that
femininity is “so mysterious and intuitive and close to the creation and origin of
life that man-made science may never be able to understand it.” Femininity so
conceived is supposedly “special” and “different” from masculinity but not
inferior. According to the feminine mystique, “the root of women’s troubles in
the past is that women envied men, women tried to be like men, instead of
accepting their own nature, which can find fulfillment only in sexual passivity,
male domination, and nurturing maternal love.”6
The romantic mystique, as I see it, has a lot in common with the feminine
mystique. The romantic mystique tells us that romantic love is also “mysterious
and intuitive and close to the creation and origin of life,” yet special and
wonderful (partly for that very reason). The romantic mystique likewise
encourages us to accept love’s “nature,” passively and uncomprehendingly,
instead of trying to resist or alter it. It is a disempowering ideology that
celebrates ignorance and acquiescence.
With love and with women, there is cultural potency to the idea that
mysteriousness is part of what is special about them. And the connection is no
accident: there is a deeply embedded perception that romantic love falls within
the sphere of women’s concerns. (Think about the gender balance among readers
of romance novels, or what we count as a “chick flick,” or which gender is
associated with all the pink and fluffy fripperies of Valentine’s Day
paraphernalia.) It’s no coincidence that love and women have been placed on the
same side of the mysterious-versus-comprehensible divide.
And it’s probably not a coincidence that some of the most powerful
contemporary work on what love really is—and why answering that question
matters so much—comes from a feminist author who also works on gender, bell
hooks. hooks is interested in all kinds of love, but love within romantic
relationships is prominent among her concerns. She thinks we need a definition
of love (particularly one that clarifies that love is incompatible with abuse),
because lacking a definition we run a serious risk of mistaking abusive situations
for loving ones. I’m not sure it’s exactly a definition that we need, but the gist of
this thinking resonates with me. To acquiesce or even revel in our own lack of
understanding of love is not just intellectually unsatisfying; it exposes us to risk.
It means refusing to arm ourselves with the knowledge and skills we need to stay
safe and make good decisions. It means we are failing to understand a lot of
what goes on around us day to day and are paying the price for that—whatever
that price may be.
When something is dangerous but insidious, just identifying and labeling it
can be half the battle. That’s why I want to start some conversations in which we
can discuss the romantic mystique by name. Treating love as massively
important yet totally incomprehensible shouldn’t strike us as normal. It is a
disaster: we are basing some of the key decisions of our lives on something we
treat as an inexplicable mystery. Why aren’t we more worried about this?
One thing that I suspect is propping up the romantic mystique is a fear that
overthinking it will have negative consequences for our own love lives. Perhaps
we fear that understanding love too thoroughly might make us bad at loving.
Perhaps we worry that we’ll lose faith and become cynical about love if we think
too hard about it. Because many hold love to be extremely valuable, anxiety
about losing it or screwing it up by overthinking it will be a powerful motivator
not to do too much thinking. But things that motivate us not to think are
dangerous.
John Shand, who teaches philosophy at the Open University in the United
Kingdom, has argued that because our everyday ways of thinking about love are
contradictory, we risk “destroying the love that we value by the mere act of
applied analysis.”7 He tells a cautionary tale about the dangers of overthinking it:
“Look at it too closely, and thereby reveal the paradoxes involved in love, and
love fails to work its magic. Many loving relationships, I suggest, involve a
suspension of disbelief, useful fictions.… [D]o not think about it too hard, do not
take it apart to see what is really going on, and one will find that it works.”
This, I suppose, must be true to Shand’s experience. Yet he says that his
theory “is derived significantly from the phenomenology of love as encountered
in our lives,” where the first person plural suggests that Shand thinks his
experience is shared. But my experience is not like this at all. I have not found
that thinking carefully and philosophically about love has caused it to evaporate.
On the contrary, it’s made me feel safer and more confident, aware, secure, and
genuine in my own relationships. It’s also made love—and life—more
interesting. I’m just one person, but then again, so is Shand. Perhaps you’re
more like me in this regard, or perhaps you’re more like Shand. If you’re more
like me, you’re probably already more worried about the tangible dangers of
underthinking than about the putative dangers of overthinking.
But if you’re more like Shand, perhaps I can say something to alleviate the
worry. In fact, let me try two approaches. First, any kind of “love” that would not
survive a long, close look may not be such a wonderful thing to have in your life
after all. Things that disappear when you look too closely often were never there
in the first place: that’s how illusions and tricks of the eye work. Perhaps you’re
thinking you’d rather be blissfully unaware, but ignorance is no guarantee of
bliss. Illusions are unstable things that can crumble for all sorts of reasons and
without warning, even if you studiously avoid looking at them.
Here’s a second reason not to be afraid of philosophizing about love.
Philosophy is about forming one’s own opinions through careful thought, not
absorbing someone else’s. I don’t expect you to agree with me about love by the
end of this book. But that aside, I won’t be trying to convince you that love is
unreal, or contradictory, or illusory. My philosophical thinking suggests romantic
love is very real, and I don’t think we were ever in any danger of analyzing it out
of existence. Love is complicated and confusing, sure, and we need to sort out a
number of philosophical problems about it. But the theory I’m offering is a
theory of a real thing. In the end I am not cynical about love, though I would say
I am careful. But it’s important to be careful. Love is an extreme sport, and we
don’t skydive without parachutes.
In my work, I am influenced by a tradition in philosophy known as analytic
metaphysics. Metaphysics is philosophical inquiry into what reality is like, and
analytic metaphysics aims to proceed in such inquiry by deploying careful,
rigorous argumentation and critical reasoning. Analytic philosophy has roots in
the work of thinkers like Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig
Wittgenstein, who were prominent professors of philosophy at Trinity College,
Cambridge, during the early twentieth century. As I studied philosophy at Trinity
College during the 1990s and early 2000s, this tradition heavily influenced my
intellectual development.
Analytic metaphysicians spend their working lives attempting to better
understand the nature of reality. We try to be careful in our thinking and clear in
our writing and to question assumptions however “natural” they feel. These
days, not very many analytic metaphysicians are working on love. But I think
this is just a kind of historical accident: analytic metaphysics has trends and
fashions, and the metaphysics of love hasn’t been fashionable lately. But love
occupies the entire careers of other scholars, artists, writers, and thinkers. I’ve
been influenced by much more of that intellectual heritage than I could ever
discuss in a short book; choosing material to include was more like curating an
interesting exhibition than composing a definitive index.
Whatever the current trends, Bertrand Russell—a founder of analytic
philosophy—had plenty to say about love, sex, and marriage. Engaging his
analytic skills, he stood ready to challenge the prevailing assumptions on these
subjects and tried to follow evidence and reasons where they led. His
conclusions were so radical that he eventually lost a university position in the
United States after being pronounced “morally unfit” for the job. Radical
thinking is not always the safest or most comfortable life choice.
My training gave me a set of techniques: a toolkit for careful, rigorous,
honest thinking—not the only such toolkit, but a powerful one. Used to its fullest
potential, it can be radical, and it can be costly. But I wouldn’t—couldn’t—trade
it in for an unquestioning mind. That carries its own costs, and in my estimation
they are much higher.

This book, then, is an invitation for you to join me at the front lines of the
philosophy of love. It comes with a starter kit: philosophical ideas, strategies,
arguments, and theories. You might find you agree or disagree with what I say,
but it is in that very process of agreeing and disagreeing that philosophers
develop and refine ideas, pushing the questions a little further and deeper with
each step in the conversation. Philosophy is a massive, ongoing, collaborative
human enterprise, and I hope you join it.
For my part in this collaboration, in this book I offer my own theory of love.
The main idea is that romantic love has a dual nature. Right now, we are
witnessing the simultaneous development of convincing social and biological
theories of what love is. Theories that make love a social or cultural construct of
some kind have been around for a while, albeit with significant variation and
development. Biological theories feel like a newer phenomenon, and, indeed, in
their current incarnations they are new, though they have older precedents. But
recent work in neuroscience makes it possible to construct a biological theory of
love with genuine plausibility. And the arrival on the scene of viable biological
theories of love forces a question: Is romantic love really a social construct or a
biological phenomenon? At this point, our two theories of love become an
embarrassment of riches. We start with the question, What is love? We’re told
that love is biology. We’re also told that love is society. That sounds like one
answer too many.
Of course, we could just pick one. There’s a problem with that, though,
serious enough to turn this choice into a dilemma: making a straight choice
amounts to losing half of our accumulated knowledge and wisdom. That would
be foolhardy for sure. Yet if we don’t make a choice, we seem to be left with an
incoherent mess in our metaphysics. With all this going on, no wonder we’re
confused.
I believe the conceptual tools needed to resolve this situation are available to
us. Inspired by philosophical work in other areas, I have come to believe in a
theory of love that can weave our embarrassment of riches into a coherent
picture. The key is to show how social and biological accounts of love are not
really in competition but are complementary descriptions of a complex reality:
love has a dual nature.
I suspect the failure to identify love’s dual nature is responsible for much of
our intellectual puzzlement about love. Even more worryingly, I suspect that it
serves as a significant barrier to progress. Torn between the biological and social
conceptions, we can easily fall back into the comforting arms of the romantic
mystique, accepting love without understanding or challenging it. We may be
held back from social critique by a niggling sense that love is a “natural,”
biological phenomenon and, as such, not a suitable subject for such critique. Yet,
at the very same time, we may be held back in attempts to gain and disseminate
a strong scientific understanding of love by a niggling sense that love is a
cultural (or perhaps totally magical or incomprehensible) phenomenon and, as
such, not a suitable subject for scientific inquiry.
In reality, neither concern should impede either project. Armed with the
correct understanding of love’s dual nature, biological and social theories of love
can progress in tandem. They can inform and strengthen one another. We can
have conversations about love that cross disciplinary boundaries in a way that
unites rather than divides our various intellectual enterprises. In fact, we urgently
need to do all this in order to make conscious and informed decisions about love.
What do we want romantic love to look like ten years from now, or twenty, or
fifty? We must ask ourselves this question and act on the answer. We have to
understand that the future of love is in our hands and that we have a
responsibility to get this right. We can only undertake positive change as a
collective enterprise, and empowering ourselves with the tools to think clearly
about love is the essential first step.
In the later chapters of this book, after outlining my theory, I will sketch
some of the ways the social aspect of love’s nature is changing over time. I’ll
explore how we might want love to change—socially and perhaps even
biologically—from what it is now. I’ll talk about what it would take to move
toward some of the practical, intellectual, and social benefits that I believe are
within reach once we understand the dual nature of love.
As for what kind of book this is, perhaps it helps to start by saying what it’s
not. It’s not relationship advice, self-help, or a collection of anecdotes. It’s not an
attempt to popularize science; nor is it an academic tome. And it’s certainly not a
survey or summary of all extant thinking about love. None of those would be a
way of achieving what I’m trying to achieve (and the last one is impossible).
I could call this book an exercise in critical thinking out loud, but it’s
important to explain why I’m doing it out loud. Why does it matter if you read
it? Because we need a conversation, not a monologue. This conversation we
need to have, about the nature of romantic love, is one of the most significant
and urgent cultural projects of our shared moment in time. So much so that I am
sometimes tempted to think of this book as “self-help” for a culture (rather than
for individuals). When we, as a society, can come to a better understanding of
what love is, we will be better able to take control of how love treats us in the
future.
So I am inviting you to be an active reader: not to passively absorb my ideas
but to question, challenge, and ultimately push these investigations far beyond
anything I can imagine right now. I can’t “do” the philosophy of love by myself;
no one can.
Ready to get started?
 1

Love Is Biology

What is your substance, whereof are you made,

That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 53

Dismantling the Romantic Mystique

There is a lot to be said for thinking of ourselves as human animals: a naturally

occurring biological phenomenon, amenable to scientific investigation like any
other. Much of modern medicine owes its success to thinking of ourselves that
way, and the dramatic increases in life expectancy and quality of life that have
accompanied medical advancement make a pretty compelling case for this
conception of what we are.
That said, it’s not surprising that romantic love—with all its poetic and
magical associations—should be a holdout against the rising tide of naturalistic
self-interpretation. The poet John Keats, writing in the early nineteenth century,
held science responsible for the loss of the world’s magic. (In keeping with his
time, he calls science “philosophy”: science and philosophy were not separated
into distinct enterprises until later.) His sentiments strike a chord with many even
today, when he says, “Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings” and “unweave a
rainbow.”1 For some people, romantic love has pride of place among a
dwindling stock of intact rainbows.
But there are risks inherent in treating love as an inexplicable mystery. The
analogy with medicine shows why. If we want a good standard of medical care,
we need medical science based on a solid grasp of human biology. That’s not all
we need for good medical care, but it is necessary. We can’t achieve this
knowledge if we treat our bodies as inexplicable and mysterious. If we don’t
even try to understand how our bodies work, we won’t know how to fix them
when they are broken. Romantic love is the same.
Recent developments in the biology of love are providing valuable insights
into how love works. Writers E. B. and K. S. White once quipped, “Humor can
be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are
discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”2 Some might say the same is
true of love, but they would be mistaken. There is actually huge public demand
for scientific information about love; its “innards” appear to be the opposite of
discouraging. Moreover, this fascination has not left everyone’s relationships
dead on the dissecting table.
In any case, there is no mileage to gain in standing at the edge of the rising
tide of science, yelling at it to turn back and not dampen the gorgeous robes of
poetry and magic we have dressed love up in. Scientists will continue to advance
our understanding of love, whether we cheer them on or mourn the magic lost in
the process. For what it’s worth, I’ll be among those doing the cheering. I think a
better scientific understanding of love can help make us safer, healthier, and
more aware of who and what we are.

Love’s Biology

That doesn’t mean we should just accept everything any scientist tells us about
love. While I am fundamentally convinced of the need for a biological theory,
many of the particular claims presented under the aegis of “biology” are suspect.
As philosophers, we must approach the biology of love with both interest and
caution.
Helen Fisher is one of the most influential contemporary theorists of
romantic love, which she treats as a thoroughly biological phenomenon. Fisher is
a researcher, author, public speaker, and advisor to online dating service
Match.com. Her work is a perfect spark for discussing the biology of love, and
as such I’ll address it in some detail. But many other influential contemporary
thinkers are also approaching love from the perspective of biology. For example,
Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá has recently made a big
impact on discussions of sex, romance, and relationships by framing these topics
in terms of what is “natural” for our species given our biological makeup and
evolutionary past.3 And this is not happening in a cultural or intellectual
vacuum: the hope that biology can answer fundamental questions about us has
been quite prevalent for some time, although it is perennially controversial.
The basic idea that romantic love is a biological phenomenon is not new.
Precedents stretch back to the ancient world (of which more later). More
recently, Renaissance medicine attributed “amorous” dispositions and “love-
melancholy” to an imbalance in bodily fluids (the four humors). More recently
still, philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer claimed that “romantic love” was just a
grandiose label for sexual desire, itself a mere prompt to biological reproduction.
The contemporary work of theorists like Fisher differs in that we may now be
able to start getting the biology right. It’s easy to see in retrospect that medicine
based on the four humors was quackery and that Schopenhauer was an angry
pessimist motivated by an alarming ideological agenda (one that included
misogyny and homophobia). But Fisher is a serious researcher who’s actually
doing the science; work like hers we cannot dismiss so easily. It’s one thing to
say love is biology of some kind or other. It’s a whole different ball game to step
up and say love consists of these specific biological mechanisms and here is the
science to prove it.
Fisher’s work is a great starting point for discussion because it provides a
clear, explicit, and—most importantly—credible contemporary development of
the idea that love is biology. Fisher thinks romantic love is literally identical to a
biological drive, one identifiable by means of its evolutionary history and its role
within the human body (and specifically the brain). So let’s explore in a bit more
detail what she says romantic love is and why.

What Drives Us

In her influential book Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic
Love, Fisher discusses experiments that she and various collaborators conducted
on individuals who said they had recently fallen intensely in love.4 Using
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, they found that these
individuals showed elevated activity in the caudate nucleus and ventral
tegmental area, regions associated with the brain’s reward system. Fisher reports
finding that the reward-related neurotransmitter dopamine appeared to be
implicated in producing some of the activities characteristic of intense romantic
love, such as obsessive focus and energy directed at the beloved. There is also
some evidence (though Fisher does not emphasize this) for the involvement of
cortisol in the early stages of romantic love. Cortisol is associated with arousal
and stress generally.5
The role of dopamine, however, is highly significant for Fisher: it supports
her view that romantic love is “a fundamental human drive,” like our need for
food and water (so, she adds, is the “maternal instinct”). Fisher thinks love is a
basic biological urge that motivates us to do things that we as a species need to
do in order to survive and thrive. She reasons that “all of the basic drives are
associated with elevated levels of dopamine,” and so she counts the involvement
of dopamine in romantic love as evidence that romantic love is likewise a basic
drive. According to Fisher, it is in fact “one of three primordial brain networks
that evolved to direct mating and reproduction”: lust, romantic love, and
attachment. She reports that each of these “travels along different pathways in
the brain” and is “associated with different neurochemicals.” Lust, she says, is
associated primarily with testosterone, romantic love with dopamine, and
attachment with oxytocin and vasopressin.
Now, even if we want to accept a theory in this vicinity, there are some
lurking philosophical questions concerning whether love should be identified
with a drive, as Fisher suggests, or with (say) the brain states or neurochemical
cocktails that result from that drive’s activation. But I’m not going to worry
about details like that for the purposes of this book.6 I find much more relevant
Fisher’s separation of attachment from romantic love. My dispute with this
might be verbal, but even so, it is one that matters. (Words, in general, matter.)
Fisher’s taxonomy is misleading: her vocabulary is a mismatch for the way we
usually talk about romantic love. An adequate, comprehensive theory of
romantic love will need to cover many cases of what Fisher classifies as
“attachment.” Stable, calm, attached love should not fail to count as romantic
just because it is stable and calm, rather than intense and passionate like the
early-stage, dopamine-driven phenomenon that Fisher identifies as “romantic”
love. Indeed, the love at the end of some of the most “romantic” stories I know is
the stable, calm kind.
Renowned philosopher Robert Nozick, writing in the 1980s, thought of
romantic love as going through two phases: an initial intense phase and a
subsequent stable phase.7 While best known for his political philosophy, Nozick
was also philosophically interested in romantic love, which he thought of as a
desire for a certain kind of union with another person. He theorized that in its
first stage, this desire would manifest as intense and passionate, while in its
second stage, after the formation of the desired union, it would become settled
and stable. Nozick’s two-stage theory resonates with many,8 but it represents a
disagreement with Fisher, who appears to classify only the first phase as
“romantic” love. She would label the second phase something else: “attachment”
love.
I disagree with Fisher: attachment love can be romantic love. But that’s not to
say I agree with Nozick’s two-stage view, at least not as a universal theory. It
seems possible for romantic love to be calm and stable from the outset; why not?
Not all relationships have to begin with passion and fireworks: sometimes old
friends gradually and peacefully realize that they are more than just friends. This
shouldn’t disqualify theirs from counting as romantic love. It also seems possible
for romantic love to be intense for its entire duration and to never settle down.
And who’s to say romantic love can’t end up alternating back and forth between
periods of calm and periods of intensity? Romantic love is not one-size-fits-all,
and an adequate theory simply has to deal with this. Both Fisher and Nozick are
trying to make a very diverse phenomenon fit the confines of too narrow a mold.
Anyhow, given that romantic love can sometimes take the form of what
Fisher would call “attachment,” we need to include the science of attachment if
we want to understand the science of romantic love in general. In this
connection, Fisher and others have emphasized the role of the hormones
oxytocin and vasopressin and of the brain region known as the hypothalamus,
which—along with the ovaries and testes—generates the relevant hormones in
the human body.

Where Does Love Come From?

To match her biological theory of what love is, Fisher offers a biological account
of where it came from. (Spoiler: evolution.) She writes, “Each brain system
evolved to direct a different aspect of reproduction. Lust evolved to motivate
individuals to seek sexual union with almost any semi-appropriate partner.
Romantic love emerged to drive men and women to focus their mating attention
on a preferred individual.… And the brain circuitry for male-female attachment
developed to enable our ancestors to live with this mate at least long enough to
rear a single child through infancy together.”
She later expands on this idea, saying that the arrival of bipedalism in our
evolutionary history “caused a problem for females: they became obliged to
carry their babies in their arms instead of on their backs.” And so they “began to
need mates to help feed and protect them—at least while they carried and nursed
a child.” Fisher proposes this as the evolutionary explanation for pair-bonding—
and hence romantic love—in our species. She reasons that because a female
would need a male to provide for her, pair-bonding became “essential” for
females. And she figures a male couldn’t protect or provide for a “harem” of
females, so pair-bonding also became “practical” for males. We know the end of
the story: “monogamy—the human habit of forming a pair-bond with one
individual at a time—evolved.”
There is a lot of philosophical work to be done here. For one thing, we need
to appreciate the impact of the heteronormative culture within which Fisher is
working, and I’ll come back to this later. For now, I want to make an initial
separation between two things that come wrapped up together in Fisher’s work:
the fascinating scientific results she is discussing (and has herself been at the
forefront of achieving) and her metaphysical theorizing as to the nature of
romantic love. The latter is a branch of philosophy, and in general scientific
expertise does not guarantee that one’s philosophical theories will be correct.
The scientific results Fisher reports include things like the observations
obtained by means of fMRI scans revealing that certain areas of the brain are
more active in individuals who report being newly and intensely in love. The
philosophical theorizing takes over when Fisher goes on to say that romantic
love is, of its essence, a basic biological drive that evolved because our helpless
female ancestors needed monogamous males to provide for them while they
reared their babies.
Of course, Fisher’s results and her theorizing are connected: she takes her
results to be evidence for her philosophical theory. “Our results changed my
thinking about the very essence of romantic love,” as she puts it. For example, as
we saw, she points to the involvement of dopamine in both romantic love and all
(other) basic human drives as a reason to believe that love is itself a basic human
drive. But as philosophers we must bear in mind that, along with data, personal
and cultural experiences in the arena of love are—inevitably—also part of what
goes into the act of theorizing about love. Fisher, like anybody, is much more
likely to believe in a theory of love that is consonant with her own experiences.
This is not a criticism: it is reasonable and rational to be more favorably
inclined toward a theory that makes sense of one’s own experiences. And there is
simply no way for us to be inquirers—whether that amounts to being a
philosopher, a biologist, an anthropologist, or simply a curious person—without
also being humans. We bring our humanity and our experience to all our
intellectual pursuits, and these impact how we proceed in those pursuits. The real
risk is not that this will happen but that if we ignore it—if we downplay the
involvement of the personal and the cultural in the intellectual—we are ignoring
some of the most powerful factors that shape the work of scientists,
philosophers, and everyone else.
I find Fisher’s philosophical theory unconvincing in part because it is so
dissonant with experiences of love drawn from my life and the lives of people I
know. I’ll say more about this later. For now, it’s enough to note that we don’t
have to agree with all the details of Fisher’s metaphysical theorizing about love
to appreciate why her scientific work is important. It is very hard to deny that the
results she has identified tell us something significant about the biological nature
of love. So let’s focus for a moment on what that is.

What Is Real

The big idea motivating Fisher—a biological theory of romantic love based on
isolating the neurochemistry and neurophysiology involved—is on the right
track. If we want to understand what love is, we will need to listen to the people
studying our bodies and brains in controlled and data-driven ways that can be
tested, peer-reviewed, reproduced, and verified and that deliver measurable
results. We will need to learn the science of love. We should respect science’s
successful track record in bringing us to a better understanding of ourselves.
Reading the experimental work conducted by Fisher and others, I find it hard to
resist the pull toward concluding that romantic love is something natural,
biological, and scientifically investigable: something “hardwired” into our
biology and brain chemistry, ready to be triggered under certain circumstances,
with the full force of an evolutionary history behind it.
If this is right, there are limits to how fully we will ever understand love just
by studying culture, literature, or art. If love is a biological phenomenon, the
scientific method has the right credentials for investigating such a thing.
Mapping cultural trends in love, however fascinating in other ways, will not give
us the necessary grasp of love’s biological profile. Biology got there first: our
dopamine and cortisol responses were developing long before anything like the
complex structure of contemporary society existed. And biology persists through
cultural change: attitudes and opinions about love come and go, but our brain
circuitry stays relatively constant across the centuries. All of this means that we
need to understand the biology of love not just for formulating a proper theory of
what love is now but also for thinking about what love has been in the past and
what it could be in the future.
Moreover, while brain circuitry is relatively stable over time, we are
acquiring new ways of interfering with it as our knowledge advances. Ethicists
and scientists are already debating the possible impacts of medical interventions
that may be able to alter how, when, or even whether love occurs. Certain drugs
may be able to enhance or encourage the biological responses characteristic of
love, while others—sometimes called “chemical breakup” drugs—may be able
to lessen or prevent these responses. This isn’t wild science fiction; it is already a
realistic possibility. For example, testosterone, oxytocin, and vasopressin are
being discussed as drugs that might increase the likelihood of love occurring or
continuing,9 while antagonists for oxytocin, vasopressin, or dopamine are being
considered as ways of reducing that likelihood.10
In the future it may be possible to intervene in the biology of love in yet more
dramatic ways. There is evidence that epigenetic effects (environmental
influences on gene expression, which are sometimes heritable) can be used to
regulate pair-bonding in mammals. In prairie voles, for example, certain
epigenetic mechanisms have been found to enhance pair-bonding (in the absence
of a more usual mechanism, sex).11 Perhaps one day we’ll be able to manipulate
human pair-bonding in similar ways. Perhaps we’ll be able to alter the
composition of our own brains so as to render ourselves incapable of love.
Perhaps we’ll bring falling in and out of love under total control, rendering it as
simple as opening and closing an app on our smartphones.
Should medical interventions to encourage or suppress love be permitted?
Should they be regulated? Would it devalue love to know that it had been
artificially enhanced?12 Would we stand to lose something valuable—
opportunities for learning or personal growth, maybe—by exercising chemical
control at love’s most difficult moments? Would it be worth paying that price to
avoid the misery of intense long-term feelings for inappropriate or abusive
partners? What about using drugs to get over someone who is just not that into
you?
We need to be having conversations about these issues, and I’ll circle back to
some of them near the end of this book. But the salient point here is that we need
to understand the biology of love even to get as far as figuring out what
questions to ask about all of this. That’s one reason why appreciating the
biological nature of love is important: it empowers us to think clearly about the
future of love, balancing what we want to do against what we actually can do.

Cocktail Recipes

We first need to appreciate that, at the biological level, love exhibits significant
variation. Even Fisher, one of the most prominent advocates of a biological
theory of love, is not saying that the biology of love looks exactly the same in
everyone. The data tell us that there are statistically significant correlations
between reported experiences of romantic love and things like heightened
activity in certain areas of the brain or elevated levels of certain brain chemicals.
But exactly how much activity in which areas and exactly how much of which
chemicals—all this is subject to interpersonal variation.
You might hear love described metaphorically as “a cocktail of chemicals.”
But if love is a cocktail, it has no single, strict recipe. It’s better conceived of as a
family of cocktails. Consider daiquiris. You’d expect to find a few basic
ingredients in a daiquiri: some kind of rum, some sort of citrus juice (usually
lime), and some sort of sweetener (usually sugar). But individual daiquiris vary
the ratios, and some include other ingredients like strawberries or bananas. Other
daiquiris get creative and replace the rum with another spirit.
The brain chemistry for love is similarly variable. What’s more, there’s
nothing at all surprising about this. All humans belong to a single species, but we
differ in the details of our biological makeup. We exhibit variation in all kinds of
traits, from obvious things like eye color and arm length to less obvious things
like fingerprints and DNA. There is no one way to have a human biology.
Romantic love is no exception to the rule.
Just as in the biology of love, in the psychology of love we see significant
diversity between individuals. To pick just one type of example, researchers
recently found that in two samples of long-term married couples, 29 and 40
percent of participants reported still being “very intensely in love” after more
than ten years of marriage.13 The study identified correlations with various other
psychological and behavioral factors. Another study found that reports of long-
term intense romantic love correlated with certain patterns of brain activity.14
These findings are intriguingly in tension with the philosophical theory of
love offered by Robert Nozick. Remember that he said romantic love is a two-
stage business: it passes through a brief, passionate first stage to reach a long-
term, calm second stage. The first stage (which Nozick calls “infatuation”) is
supposed to transform into continuing love or else disappear. But someone who
feels “very intensely” in love after ten years of marriage doesn’t fit comfortably
into either of Nozick’s two boxes.
Interpersonal variation is no barrier to proper scientific understanding,
however. In fact, when carefully handled, the science of love serves to protect us
against making unscientific overgeneralizations that float free of empirical data.
The scientific method, properly applied, cautions us not to overinterpret the
limited data we have.

Science Will Save Us

Isn’t there something intellectually comforting about the idea that science can
finally tell us what love really is? Isn’t it reassuring to think we might finally get
some answers, through the application of tried and trusted experimental
methods, to our deepest and most perplexing questions about love? It is to me.
Love can make people behave in such strange ways and exerts such a formative
influence in so many people’s lives. Yet it’s been treated as irredeemably
mysterious for so long that we’ve come to regard bafflement as a normal state of
affairs. It is awfully tempting—and not unrealistic—to hope that science will
finally dispel the romantic mystique.
The kinds of answers we get from the science of love really do seem to
explain a lot when it comes to things like the strange behaviors that love can
induce. Studies are revealing important biochemical similarities between the
brains of people who are intensely in love and those of people experiencing
chemical addiction. Fisher describes some of these results in a TED talk titled
“The Brain in Love,” in which she explains how she and her colleagues found
that romantic love is linked with activity in the ventral tegmental area,
particularly the A10 cells, which make dopamine. She refers to this as part of the
“reptilian core of the brain, associated with wanting, with motivation, with
focus, and with craving.” As she points out, the very same brain region also gets
activated during a cocaine rush.15
A biological approach to the nature of love has a lot going for it. It promises
relatively clear and straightforward answers to the old question, What is love?
We could say love is a kind of neurochemical cocktail (or, better, family of
cocktails). Or we could say—with Fisher—that love is a basic drive, like hunger
or thirst, that evolved in our evolutionary past to use these chemical cocktails to
get us to behave in ways that promoted the survival of our species. These
biological theories offer real explanatory value and help make sense of what
people in love go through: love can feel like addiction because it can
biochemically resemble addiction. Love is powerfully motivating because it
evolved for an important purpose. We can rigorously test and refine the
information on which this kind of theory rests, using methodologies that have
proven their value in many areas of science. On top of all that, the biological
approach to love has important practical implications: when discussing how we
might want love to change, particularly when it comes to using biochemical
interventions to encourage or suppress love, we have to start out with a good
grasp of love’s biological nature or we’ll be wasting our breath.

Will Science Save Us?

And yet … there’s an “and yet.” Taking a purely biological approach to love
raises some tricky issues. For starters, we need to ask a few questions about
methodology. Current scientific research on romantic love relies heavily on self-
reporting: when selecting study participants who are “in love,” researchers take
their cue from what people tell them. This can be a problem, as people might not
be fully accurate, honest, or consistent in this kind of self-reporting for all kinds
of reasons—some idiosyncratic, some systematic; some deliberate, some
unintentional.16
There are also philosophical concerns that run deeper than method. If we say
that love is biology—literally a feature of our biological makeup—then we
appear to be committed to saying that any creature with a radically different
makeup from ours cannot be in love. Maybe other animals with enough
similarities in their evolutionary pasts could be candidates, but we would be
ruling out the possibility of an artificially intelligent computer or robot falling in
love: regardless of how sophisticated the technology becomes, computers and
robots would not share enough of our biology or evolutionary history. By the
lights of a biological theory of love, the plot of the movie Her—in which a man
seems to fall in love with his computer operating system (OS) and vice versa—
would be no more than a story about a deeply confused individual. His OS
cannot love him: an OS is incapable of love because it is not a biological
organism, and love is a biological phenomenon.
Maybe that sounds just right to you: perhaps you agree that a computer OS
could not be in love. But what about other possible creatures with very different
biologies and evolutionary histories? What about aliens? Or what about designer
life forms that didn’t evolve at all but were brought into existence through direct
human agency? If love is indeed a feature of human biology, then all these other
creatures can never be in love. Now perhaps you’re not too worried about aliens
and designer life forms either: after all, we don’t exactly bump into them on a
daily basis. But do we really want a theory of love to tie our hands on these
questions about what’s possible? Do we want to buy into a theory that limiting
before all the facts are in about what we might encounter in the future?
Maybe a biological theorist of love can do some fancy philosophical
footwork and find a way to avoid these theoretical constraints. These issues arise
in other areas of philosophy too—for example, in the investigation of what pain
is—and metaphysicians of the mind are already at work developing ingenious
solutions. But another serious issue lurks: a purely biological theory of romantic
love doesn’t properly accommodate the role of culture and society. A purely
biological theory predicts that cultural influences play a negligible to nonexistent
role in determining the nature of romantic love. Our biology is not in any
substantial way a product of society or culture. So if love is part of our biology,
love is not in any substantial way a product of society or culture.
This would mean we must reject claims like “Romantic love has changed a
lot over the last few hundred years and is still changing” or “Romantic love
differs radically between cultures.” Ancient, evolved brain chemistry and
fundamental human drives don’t differ radically among cultures and don’t
change much in the space of a few hundred years. So why does romantic love
seem to vary so much across time and across cultures if it is a biological
phenomenon? This is the one big question to which a simple biological theory of
love cannot give any answer that I would find satisfying. The theory predicts
some individual variation in different people’s cocktail recipes for love, but
biology alone cannot adequately explain these large-scale variations that look
like they are tracking cultural differences.
A biological theory of love can be intellectually satisfying in a number of
ways and practically important for making informed ethical choices. But if
you’re anything like me, it just doesn’t feel like the whole story. In the next
chapter I expand on the themes of change and intercultural variation as I
examine the case for saying that romantic love is not a biological phenomenon
after all but rather a socially constructed one.
 2

Love Is Society

LOVE, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of

the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder.
This disease, like caries and many other ailments, is prevalent only
among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous
nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity
from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the
physician than to the patient.
—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Let’s Just Talk

Not even an introvert like me exists in a social vacuum. The society around us
constantly shapes and influences everything we think, say, and do. This
influence often goes unnoticed; it tends to make its presence felt only when we
start resisting it in some way. But noticed or not, it is real, and its effects are
powerful. In many ways we are artifacts of culture.
When I talk publicly about having two partners, people often react by trying
to reinforce the cultural norm of monogamy that I’ve broken. Some call me
horrible names in anonymous comments or messages, attempting to shore up
that norm. Others remind me that I’m not “normal” in subtler ways: unprompted
declarations that they “could never do that,” for example, or reminders that my
life is “an experiment” (as if anyone’s isn’t). But I want to talk about the power
of the unsubtle for a moment. Let’s think about the word “slut.”
 The meaning of the word “slut” encodes a socially significant idea: that
promiscuous women are bad. The word packs together a description
(promiscuous woman) and an evaluation (bad). This means that when you use
this word uncritically, you commit yourself to that value judgment: that is, you
signal to the world that you think promiscuous women are bad. Of course, the
meanings of words can change, and some pejoratives and slurs get reclaimed
over time, losing their negative connotations. But “slut” retains much of its
negative charge, despite some efforts at reclamation.
I mention this because language is a great case study in how our mechanisms
for transmitting socially significant information are simultaneously effective and
invisible. When we learn a language as children, we do not critically assess each
new word, think through all the consequences of using it, and decide whether or
not we approve of those consequences. We just imitate the people around us. We
just talk. But learning the word “slut” at an early age will influence our
perception of women for the rest of our lives. As any advertiser will tell you, a
name can change everything. A rose by the name “poo-petals” would not smell
as sweet.1 But most people never notice how the language they speak prescribes
their worldview.
Slurs are among the more obvious examples of how language shapes our
understanding, but all sorts of language can be used to encode social
information, transmitting and reinforcing cultural values. Indeed, the very fact
that we even have a word for something provides an implicit signal that it is
worth talking about. The effects of lacking words to describe one’s own
experiences can be serious. For example, lacking a word like “polyamorous,” a
polyamorous person can be left reaching for words that encode a negative
judgment (such as “unfaithful”) or suggest a crime or sin (such as “adulterous”).
Only being able to describe your intimate feelings by passing negative judgment
on yourself has psychological consequences.
The worldviews encoded in our language are handed to us through the social
mechanism of language learning, so what we get depends on the particular social
context we happen to find ourselves in when we are acquiring language. It’s a bit
of a lottery.

What Have We Created?

Language is just one of a suite of powerful tools that societies use to transmit
information and reinforce values. We are also permanently imbibing the art,
politics, institutions, laws, practices, and traditions of the culture within which
we are embedded. We have been taking all this in by osmosis since our earliest
childhood, and it’s now practically impossible to think outside all of these boxes,
even if we try. They are such a normal and continuous part of life that they seem
completely “natural” to us. It’s no coincidence that we use this word
—“natural”—to describe the utterly familiar: familiarity makes it so easy to
mistake culture for nature.
Romantic love is a perfect example of how society shapes our sense of what
is “natural.” In this chapter I discuss the theory that romantic love is a social
construct—something society has created—rather than a feature of biology. I
look at reasons for denying that romantic love is a human universal (at least in
any straightforward way): despite what the biological theory of love would have
us believe, there are good reasons for treating romantic love as a relatively
recent, localized phenomenon, one that varies significantly among cultures
because they construct it differently.
To think our way into these ideas, let’s consider ancient Greece for a moment.
In ancient Greece, marriage was largely about procreation and the controlled
inheritance of property. It was treated as a kind of transaction in which fathers
could present their daughters to prospective grooms as gifts, prizes, or rewards.
(Today the practice of fathers’ symbolically or ceremonially “giving away”
brides to their husbands echoes this conception of marriage.) As Western
European society changed, romantic love took over the institution of marriage.
Contemporary weddings in Western Europe and North America usually come
with a presumption that love brought the couple together, not a financial
arrangement between men.
Now here’s a way of interpreting this change. As a new social arrangement
emerged in Western European culture, a new role gradually opened up: a place in
social life for a kind of love distinctively related to marriage. A need had arisen
for a kind of love that would bring couples together in a monogamous, lifelong,
nuclear family–like bond, replacing the work previously done by patriarchal
financial arrangements.
Seen that way, a view of romantic love as defined by its role in this new
social setup starts to make sense: it appeared because we had created certain
specific work for it to do. Of course, various other kinds of love were around
already; we’re talking about how romantic love (as we know it) came to exist.
The ancient Greeks had several words for different kinds of love, including eros,
agape, and philia. Eros is often translated as “passionate love” or “desire”;
agape is usually taken to refer to a kind of brotherly love (interpreted in some
Christian traditions as the love of God for us and vice versa); and philia is a kind
of friendly affection. But romantic love isn’t exactly any of these, although it can
include components of each. Eros is perhaps the best contender, but romantic
love need not always be passionate (or “erotic” in the modern sense). And a pure
sexual lust could count as a form of eros but would not count as romantic love.
The idea that romantic love is a social construct is part of a broader
intellectual movement that pushes back against our temptation to attribute to
biology things that are really the products of social institutions, practices, and
traditions. This movement stretches across contemporary debates about the
nature of gender, race, disability, orientation, and other things. A social
constructionist about gender, for example, might say that gender is not a feature
of a person’s “natural” biological makeup; it is rather a matter of conforming (or
being expected to conform) to certain norms around behavior, dress, self-
presentation, social roles, and so on. Gender, in this constructionist picture, is
created when we as a society decide to bundle together these norms and attach
them to biological markers (such as genitalia or chromosomes). While a gender
may be assigned to a child at birth on a presumed biological basis—say, based
on the child’s having “male” or “female” genitalia—the social constructionist
maintains that gender itself is no part of the child’s biology. This offers one
possible explanation for how some trans* people can be assigned a gender that
does not match their gender identity.
A social constructionist about romantic love may hold, correspondingly, that
romantic love is a product of social expectations, traditions, and norms rather
than a biological phenomenon. Love might be associated with biological
markers—once identifiable as fuzzy feelings of excitement or warmth, now
traceable to the involvement of dopamine or oxytocin—but the constructionist
says these biological markers are not what romantic love truly is.
So what exactly is romantic love for a social constructionist? Well, it depends
on which constructionist you ask. But just as Helen Fisher gave us a clear
example of a biological theory, two psychologists—Anne Beall and Robert
Sternberg—offer a clear example of a social constructionist theory. So let’s take
a look at what they think love is and why.
 It Takes a Village to Fall in Love

In 1995 Beall and Sternberg published a paper titled “The Social Construction of
Love.”2 In this work they say they find it “difficult, if not impossible,” to address
the question of what romantic love is because “any answer must reflect its time
period and place, and in particular, the functions that romantic love serves
there.” In other words, whatever the biological theorists might say, there is no
hope of a once-and-for-all answer. Love varies among cultures. And Beall and
Sternberg don’t just mean that it gets described or expressed differently: they
mean the actual phenomenon—the experience of love itself—varies. (Culture
certainly affects how we express love, but that by itself would be no challenge to
the idea that love’s nature is biological. After all, culture also affects how we
express hunger and pain.)
To give one example inspired by their discussion, consider a woman falling
in love in Victorian England. The idea is that she will literally go through a
different process compared to a woman falling in love in contemporary Canada.
For the Victorian lady, falling in love is a matter of developing a deep and
respectful (but probably rather distant) admiration for a man. Sexual desire is at
best irrelevant to this process, at worst a shameful distraction. For the
contemporary Canadian, however, falling in love is a matter of developing an
intimate attachment that normatively includes sexual desire. If sexual desire is
absent, that is at best noticeably unusual; at worst it is interpreted as showing
that the feelings involved are not romantic but platonic.
According to the constructionist theory, this is a difference in the actual
phenomenon of romantic love, not just how love gets expressed. But notice that
even variation in the phenomenon itself doesn’t yet prove that love is a social
construct. After all, two different cultural groups might vary with regard to how
fast their fingernails grew for genetic or environmental reasons; rate of nail
growth would still be a biological feature and not a socially constructed one. The
key point is that genetics and environment don’t offer any obvious explanation
for the differences between Victorian love and contemporary love. While
variation across cultures does not entail social constructionism, it provides
evidence for it when the best or only explanation of that variation is that
different societies are constructing different things.
As Beall and Sternberg put it, “There is not one particular ‘reality’ that is
simultaneously experienced by all people.” When it comes to love, people “are
not passive recipients of a set of events” but “are actively constructing social
information.” This is their constructionist conclusion. There is also the
alternative of attributing mass error: we could say that one culture has romantic
love truly figured out, and everyone else is getting it wrong. But I don’t see any
legitimate reason for privileging one culture’s ideas about love in this way,
taking them alone to track reality. (In particular, I don’t think biology gives us
any reason to privilege one culture’s ideas about love; I’ll say more about this
later.)
It is also significant that the kinds of variation love exhibits are major and
quite central to the whole idea of what love is—indeed, who we are. They do not
reflect mere tinkering around the edges of a kind we could easily attribute to
misunderstandings or differences of expression. Beall and Sternberg present a
wealth of examples of large-scale cultural variation as evidence to support their
constructionist view. We’ve already seen how romantic love was not always
sexualized: Victorian culture commonly conceived of love as lofty, admirable,
and asexual, while it viewed sex quite negatively. During the Enlightenment,
romantic love was seen as rational (or at least potentially under rational control),
while the Romantics saw it as uncontrollable and tumultuous. The treatment of
love as the basis for marriage and family formation is a recent development in
cultures of European origin. And some older work cited by Beall and Sternberg
suggests that the kind of romantic love construed as “normal” in contemporary
US culture would more likely seem “aberrant” from the perspective of Chinese
culture. Beall and Sternberg diagnose this last difference by contrasting what
they perceive as American individualism—with its emphasis on emotional self-
expression—with what they characterize as a Chinese cultural emphasis on
family and social relations. (It is worth bearing in mind, however, that they were
writing in 1995 and citing research from the 1980s. Attitudes toward this kind of
difference have become more sophisticated over time, as researchers veer away
from dealing in monolithic cultural stereotypes.)
Beall and Sternberg also explain how these differing social standards shape
individual experiences: people regulate their own experiences of love, and those
of others around them, by encouraging favored manifestations and discouraging
others in accordance with the norms of their social setting. The resultant
phenomenon is, in many ways, a far cry from anything “hardwired” in us by
nature or biology.
 Society Versus Biology

Supposing love is indeed a social construct, what should we say about biology?
Beall and Sternberg do not entirely deny its relevance, but they mention it only
in passing: “We can presume love includes [a biological] component,” they say,
and they quickly move on. I devoted the entire previous chapter to the biology of
love because I think the place of biology in this story is too important and
complicated to pass over quickly. In fact, many of the most important
philosophical questions about love arise precisely at the interface between love’s
social construction and its biology. At a minimum, we must understand the
biology of love to understand what belongs on the social side and what doesn’t.
But it’s not surprising that biology typically fails to loom large in the thinking
of social constructionists. When it comes to theorizing about the nature of a
phenomenon—be it love or anything else—social constructionism is typically
set in opposition to the biological approach. Consider a 1992 article by Williams
Jankoviak and Edward Fischer titled “A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Romantic
Love.”3 Jankoviak and Fischer point out that a majority of anthropologists and
psychologists have previously assumed that romantic love is a social construct,
but some “evolutionary-oriented” scientists (including Helen Fisher, whose work
we discussed in chapter 1) have started to ask whether it might be a “human
universal” centered on a “biological core.” “This evolutionary perspective,” they
say, “suggests that romantic love arises from forces within the hominid brain that
are independent of the socially constructed mind.”
Jankoviak and Fischer then corral empirical evidence and analysis to make
the case that romantic love is indeed a biological human universal and not a
social construct. They analyzed data from 166 cultures, looking for evidence of
the presence of romantic love. Although they failed to find such evidence in
nineteen of the cultures they studied, they “believe[d] that these negative cases
result[ed] from ethnographic oversight.” Because they found romantic love to be
present in the remaining 147 cultures, they concluded that it can be “muted, but
never entirely repressed,” by social factors.
However, we should question what exactly they were measuring. They define
romantic love as “any intense attraction that involves the idealization of the
other, within an erotic context, with the expectation of enduring for some time
into the future.” This makes it sound a lot like they were measuring a form of
sexual infatuation. As a baseline, romantic love surely has to be a kind of love,
but the Jankoviak-Fischer definition doesn’t seem to require this.
Another pressing question is just what it would take for romantic love to be a
human “universal.” Jankoviak and Fischer examined cultures for whether
romantic love is present in them at all. But Beall and Sternberg were looking at
the ways romantic love varies across cultures. Love might be “universal” in one
sense but not the other: even if it is always present, it could be substantially
different in different cultures, and the latter kind of variation might still be
evidence of social construction.
Jankoviak and Fischer’s results are nevertheless interesting and suggestive:
they indicate that something in the broad vicinity of romantic attraction
transcends even extremes of cultural difference. Biology may yet be a bigger
part of the puzzle than a simple social constructionism can account for.
By this point the picture is starting to look deeply complex. The complexity
seems to involve a clash between social constructionism and the biological
approach. And yet there is clearly wisdom on both sides. This tangle requires
careful unpicking; we can give up any hope of a quick fix or an answer we can
sum up in a platitude. Once again, I find myself starting to wonder what is real
here.

What Is Real, Part II

While Beall and Sternberg’s constructionism may not be the whole story, they
are clearly right about the social significance of romantic love in many cultures.
This is closely tied to love’s social function: its role in structuring a society by
providing contours for how intimate, loving relationships are supposed to be
configured. It defines the tramlines, as it were, along which we expect our
relationships—and our lives—to run. Beall and Sternberg put it this way:
“Conceptions of love reflect cultural ideas about humanity.”
Think of how Enlightenment love was taken to be under rational control,
whereas Romantic thinkers treated love as uncontrollable and tumultuous. This
parallels a shift in the dominant understandings of human nature, from
fundamentally reasonable and rational (Enlightenment) to fundamentally
passionate and untamed (Romantic). Different ways of socially constructing love
“implicitly define what is appropriate and desirable in human relations,” as Beall
and Sternberg say. For example, conceptions that they describe as “Western”—
wherein romantic love is construed as a suitable basis for marriage—
predominate in individualistic societies organized around a nuclear family
structure. By contrast, they associate the prevalence of arranged marriages with
extended family structure and collectivist social attitudes.
As with Fisher’s biological theory, I feel basically persuaded by the gist of
Beall and Sternberg’s social constructionism. But I am hesitant about it for two
reasons. First, from a philosophical perspective, it can’t be the whole story:
biology is part of the puzzle. And second, I want to spell out the details of love’s
social construction in my own way.
Before I go into those details, though, let me highlight two common mistakes
about social constructionism. These mistakes tend to crop up in discussions of
the social construction of gender, race, and other things too, so they’re well
worth clearing up: just keeping these two points in mind will put you ahead of
the game in most conversations about social constructionism.
The first mistake is to imagine that social constructs are a kind of fantasy or
fiction. There is a temptation to say that anything socially constructed is “made
up” and hence not “real.” A 2015 Globe and Mail column by Margaret Wente
contains multiple examples of this slip in quick succession: “Race and sex are
more than social constructs. They also are facts. And you can’t change the facts
the way you change your shirt.… Gender, for example, is no longer viewed as an
inescapable biological fact, but is really an arbitrary product of our belief
systems.… Race, too, is often said to be a fiction.… Yet as a social construction,
it is an awfully sturdy one.”4
This sort of thing is common, but it is a serious error. Many social constructs
are very real (and, incidentally, many are far from arbitrary). Just think of
business corporations, universities, laws, political parties, birthday parties, or the
country where you live. All of these things are created by social institutions,
practices, and traditions. But they obviously don’t belong to the realm of fiction,
alongside Sherlock Holmes and unicorns. Laws are as much a part of real life as
mountains and kittens. If we wrote two big lists of things that are real and things
that aren’t, Holmes and unicorns would go on the “not real” list, but laws would
go with mountains and kittens on the “real” list. Socially constructed things are
playing vital roles in your life right now if you live in a country with a
government, use a currency, work for a business, or are the legal guardian of a
child.
 The second mistake is to imagine that social institutions, practices, or
traditions that one finds abhorrent do not give rise to real social constructs. For
example, if someone finds violence toward the innocent abhorrent and on that
basis decides that any law prescribing or condoning such violence is not a real
law, that person is making this second kind of mistake. Laws are just as real
when they are unethical or misguided. There was a very real law against male
homosexuality in England in the 1950s; among its very real effects was
“chemical castration,” to which the famous logician and philosopher Alan
Turing was subjected. Immoral laws shape people’s lives, and it takes real work
to dismantle them. If they weren’t real laws, they wouldn’t be such a problem.
In an analogous way, a set of misguided social norms and traditions can give
rise to a social construct of romantic love that needlessly and harmfully excludes
same-sex love. This social construct is no less real on account of its being based
in unethical practices. It still impacts people’s lives, and it takes work to change
a situation like this. So to sum up my two main points here: many social
constructs are real, and some of them are really awful. If romantic love is indeed
a social construct, that doesn’t mean it isn’t serious business or that it isn’t
seriously messed up.

K-I-S-S-I-N-G

Now for some of the details. Think how much information about love is packed
into a playground rhyme:

[Name] and [name] sittin’ in a tree

K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
First comes love, then comes marriage,
then comes baby in a baby carriage.

This rhyme teaches children what love is by teaching them what love does: it
ingrains in their minds the idea of romantic love as occupying a place between
physical affection on the one hand and marriage-plus-reproduction on the other.
It also presents love as something that involves two people (there are only spaces
for two names in the rhyme) and is typically hetero (usually one girl’s name and
one boy’s name are used).
My theory about love’s nature is ultimately a version of the old adage that
“love is as love does.”5 And this one cute rhyme conveys such a lot of
information about what love does. Love, the rhyme tells us, takes as input two
people (of different genders) who are (physically) affectionate, and it outputs a
nuclear family. Love is a nexus, connecting these important dots in social life.
That is its function, its role.
In a society that values romantic love as its primary model for a “normal”
life, powerful feelings of care and desire that one experiences for another person
will tend to be focused toward the creation of a marriage-based, monogamous,
lifelong, reproductive family unit with that person. Once formed, that nuclear
unit can be locked in by providing social and legal benefits (such as tax breaks,
social approbation, and hospital visiting rights) that incentivize staying together,
while making the alternatives (separation and divorce) costly and complicated.
Romantic love has the function of structuring society into nuclear family
units, harnessing the powerful forces of adult attraction, affection, and care to
that end. It works so well that it becomes easy to forget that the default nuclear
family is not the only way to structure social life. We could all live in larger
communal groups. Or we could all live much more isolated lives. Or we could
treat a wide range of social configurations as normal rather than seeing any one
model as the “default.” But we don’t. We (literally) romanticize romantic love,
and in so doing we hand it the power to structure society—to direct us into
nuclear family units. That is the real power of love.
But is this a good thing or a bad thing? Well, it can be either. Often it’s both.
To explain why, let me say a bit more about what I think love is. First, romantic
love is a kind of love. That much seems clear (although it is in danger of getting
overlooked in some of the research). So what makes romantic love a kind of
love? Well, it has features that any kind of love would have: it involves care,
concern, trust, openness, and tenderness, for example.6 I am not saying these
things are social constructs; nor am I saying that all kinds of love are socially
constructed. Social construction, in my view, comes into play in separating out
certain kinds of love as “romantic.” Romantic love’s distinctive social function
sets it apart from all other kinds of love.
This function is of the essence for understanding romantic love’s social
nature. Other kinds of love—such as the kind of love involved in a close
friendship—do not have the same function: it is normally accepted that one may
have as many friends as one cares to have, and there is no expectation that one
will live with one’s friends or have their children. If we do start experiencing
very powerful feelings of care or desire for a friend, we are pressured to interpret
this as falling in romantic love.
Of course, love’s function doesn’t always work out: love may go unrequited,
face insuperable practical obstacles, fizzle, and so on. Love can fail to generate
stable nuclear family units in all sorts of ways. But the very fact that these things
get counted as “failures” goes to show what love is supposed to do.
And although love’s function is important, that doesn’t mean it’s possible to
count someone who just goes through the motions as being “in love”—that is, if
they do all the kissing, marriage, nuclear family formation, reproduction, and so
on, while feeling nothing. As I said up front, romantic love is a kind of love. Its
distinctive social role is what makes it romantic, not what makes it love. Love
isn’t compatible with going through the motions and feeling nothing. And
although it’s not my main focus in this chapter, I do want to keep in mind that in
addition to its social nature, romantic love has a biological profile that can help
explain why it is associated with powerful feelings. (I will come back to this
issue.)
I also don’t mean to suggest that the social function of romantic love is
unchanging or inevitable. On the contrary, social structures change, and the
functional role of romantic love changes along with them. I am trying to capture
what romantic love is—that is, what it does—around me here and now.
Supposing all this is on the right track, one of the most important
consequences is that there is space for questioning and critiquing romantic love
and specifically its role in structuring society. If we thought of romantic love as a
universal, “natural,” biological phenomenon, then social critique would seem
unproductive and inappropriate. (We could bemoan the social consequences of
headaches, but to cure them we need medicine, not marches.) But once we start
to see how we are responsible for romantic love’s social contours—how we
create and sustain them through the cultural norms we accept and reinforce—
everything changes. This way of understanding what love is suddenly throws
open a whole range of possibilities for what love could be.
But what, now, has happened to the original case for thinking of love as
biological? By this point it may be starting to look like things have gotten
seriously tangled, and sooner or later we are going to have to choose. We’ll
either have to say romantic love is hardwired into our biology—a bundle of
neurochemical responses that we’ve evolved to exhibit under certain
circumstances—or that it is a social construct with a particular function in
organizing society. Surely it can’t be both. Our evolved neurochemistry is not a
social construct. What gives?
I believe we can answer that question in a philosophically satisfying way. But
before I explain how, I want to take a side step through some of the
philosophical background. Philosophy has consistently both inspired and
disappointed me in my efforts to understand love. So to put my work in context,
let me take you on a whistle-stop tour through some of what philosophers have
had to say about love over the years and where that leaves a philosopher of love
these days.
 3

Gems at the Garage Sale:

Philosophers on Love

And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company
together now-a-days; the more the pity that some honest neighbours
will not make them friends.
—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Unlike Many Other Philosophers

When I first started studying what philosophers had to say about love, I have to
admit I was disappointed. At its best, philosophical inquiry can be creative,
original, exciting, and unsettling. It can reveal our hidden assumptions, forcing
us to look them in the face and assess them for what they are worth. In real life,
though, no discipline is perfect, and not everything done under the banner of
“philosophy” is all that. Some of it is a frankly embarrassing catalogue of
pompous people tripping over their own assumptions. Sadly, the philosophy of
love is no exception.
But philosophy has inspired me too, so I want to start with some of the
inspirations. Bertrand Russell is one philosopher who’s inspired and influenced
me in multiple ways. If you studied philosophy at university and came across
Russell in that context, you might know him for his theory of definite
descriptions (which tries to explain the inner logical workings of sentences that
seem to be about nonexistent objects, like “The present King of France is bald”).
Fascinating though this is, Russell’s thinking about love and marriage had a far
bigger impact on the world than his thinking about logic and language. Russell
won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950 on the strength of his books for “a
public of laymen,” which, according to the award ceremony speech, contain a
good deal of material that “excites protest”—and precisely this sets Russell
apart. “Unlike many other philosophers, [Russell] regards this as one of the
natural and urgent tasks of an author.”1
One of his protested books was Marriage and Morals.2 First published in
1929, this book now reads as considerably ahead of its time. Russell was a
precursor of the contemporary “sex-positive” movement: he utterly rejected the
idea that sex was shameful, sinful, or dirty. He called the repressive sexual mores
of his own era a “morbid aberration,” comparable to the prohibition of alcohol in
the United States (i.e., producing outcomes of a lower quality but making them
seem a lot more exciting than they really were). He thought we should be less
prudish about pornography, scolded men for failing to make sex enjoyable for
their female partners, helped campaign for the decriminalization of male
homosexuality in the United Kingdom, and denounced the “blazing injustice” of
treating sex workers with no respect. He stressed the importance of providing
comprehensive information about sex—including birth control and sexual health
—to young people. Perhaps most famously of all, he advocated for what in his
time was known as “free love,” foreshadowing contemporary notions of “open”
and “monogamish” relationships.
Is Russell starting to sound a bit like Dan Savage to you? If so, that is a pretty
fair comparison. But to give this some context, Russell published Marriage and
Morals thirty-five years before Savage was even born. Still, Russell had what—
in contemporary terms—we would call a huge platform, from which he could
disseminate his progressive opinions widely, even when they utterly contravened
prevailing social norms. Just as Dan Savage’s platform rests on the success of a
hugely popular advice column and podcast, Russell’s sprang from his own prior
achievements, albeit of a different kind: he traded on his outstanding early work
in logic and the philosophy of mathematics, his scholarly reputation, and his
affiliations with the University of Cambridge and the Royal Society. It’s worth
bearing in mind, too, that Russell’s social class bolstered his ability to speak out
on controversial topics: as a member of the British aristocracy, he was more
audible than most of his contemporaries and better shielded from the
consequences of voicing his views. Yet even with these advantages, Russell ran
into serious trouble for thinking and speaking freely, eventually losing an
academic job after scandalizing the world—or at least social conservatives in the
United States—with his attitudes toward love and sex. His work on these topics
never secured a place in the established canon of academic philosophy, despite
its impact on the world at large.

Bootleg Russell

Although love mattered deeply to Russell, over the years the very tradition of
philosophy that he helped to launch has largely shied away from his style of
publicly engaged critical thinking about things like love, sex, and relationships.
As a student of philosophy at Cambridge, I was thoroughly put through my
paces on Russell’s philosophy of logic and language, and as a graduate student I
delved into his philosophy of mathematics. But his views on love, marriage, and
sex were never on the syllabus.
Naturally, this just makes them even more intriguing: Russell was not wrong
about the psychological impact of attempts to keep something off people’s radar.
Discovering Marriage and Morals felt like discovering bootleg Russell:
intoxicating if a bit dodgy. I was fascinated to read this work in which Russell is
so compellingly at once both a philosopher and a human being.
It’s not by chance that this book didn’t make it onto my syllabus. Russell
himself said that his work on love and other sociopolitical subjects was a
separate business from his “philosophy.” This distinction both reflected and
reinforced conservative conceptions of what belongs in the academy. But
whatever his classifications, Russell clearly considered his capacities for open-
minded critical thinking relevant to the topic of love. And whatever he thought
“philosophy” was, philosophy actually has a venerable tradition of engaged—
sometimes unsettling—critical thought on hot sociopolitical topics, love
included. Plato’s Republic and Symposium are about how the state should
operate and how people should practice love, and these works are at least as
political and polemical as anything Russell ever wrote. Socrates was put to death
for “corrupting the youth” with his unsettling conversations and for his
“impiety” in questioning things one wasn’t supposed to question. This kind of
work has always been part of philosophy’s remit. Twentieth-century efforts to
redefine philosophy as a “pure” logico-scientific and apolitical pursuit were a
temporary blip and ultimately a failure. My generation of philosophers is now
coming to understand that academic philosophy was never apolitical (although
pretending it was often led to a dangerous lack of awareness).
In any case, what Russell did in his philosophical work on love—as opposed
to how he labeled it—is a source of inspiration to me. It was influential in my
decision to write this book. But inspiration is complicated, and I don’t want to
give the impression that Russell is my hero. (He also expounded racist beliefs
and displayed grossly dehumanizing attitudes toward disability.)
Despite the book’s title, in Marriage and Morals romantic love is really the
star of the show. Russell thought that sex should be treated as “experimentation
with a view to love” and that marriage should be about the legal recognition and
regulation of relationships based on love (its main purpose being to ensure the
proper long-term care of the biological children born into loving hetero
relationships). Note how, once again, romantic love is presented as playing a
distinctive functional role in society: for Russell, love is a nexus linking sexual
experimentation on the one hand with stable reproductive nuclear family units
on the other. We find in Russell more or less the same theory of love that the K-
I-S-S-I-N-G rhyme conveys to children on the playground.
Russell’s radical addition was that a love-based marriage need not be
sexually or romantically monogamous. He proposed open marriages as an
alternative, making the case that it is better to rein in jealousy than to rein in
love. However, unlike his contemporary counterpart Dan Savage—who
acknowledges that monogamy works for some while nonmonogamy works for
others—Russell seemed to be proposing open marriage as the new norm for
everyone.
So what did Russell think was so bad about monogamy? The answer lies in
how he thought monogamous romantic love was connected to gender and power.
He diagnosed the addition of monogamy into the social role of love and
marriage as emanating from men’s desire to secure reproductive control over
women in order to create and maintain a patriarchal, family-based social order
with property inheritance passing down the male line. (The idea of imposing
sexual monogamy as a restriction on men, as Russell notes, is a more recent
development.) Russell ultimately attributes patriarchy itself, with its attendant
physical and mental “subjection” of women, to the discovery of how biological
paternity works. He also emphasizes the role of religion in enforcing patriarchy,
monogamy, and women’s oppression (particularly Christianity, which Russell
identifies as elevating fatherhood to a position of supreme importance).
As a consequence of all this, Russell says, it came to be seen as ideal for
women to lack sexual desire altogether, since this made it much easier to control
their reproductive potential. But this kind of situation could be sustained only if
women were continually oppressed. Moreover, Russell regarded the imposition
of monogamy on both sexes as a leveling down, not a solution: “If we may judge
by appearances,” he says, “women will tend to prefer a system allowing freedom
to both sexes than one imposing upon men the restrictions which hitherto have
been suffered only by women.” Russell doesn’t say exactly what “appearances”
he is judging by here, but I assume he based this statement on his own
experiences of interacting with women. In a similar vein, Russell wanted us to
know that “women whose sexual life is uninhibited are as liable as men to
[sexual] impulses,” as far as he had been able to observe.

What Do We Want?

Eighty-five years on, these anecdotal hypotheses of Russell’s are finally being
taken seriously enough to be scientifically tested. The results are starting to
make a cultural impact, evinced in the recent success of popular books like
Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s Sex at Dawn and Daniel Bergner’s What
Do Women Want.3
To give an example, new empirical research by psychologists Andreas
Baranowski and Heiko Hecht challenges the received wisdom that women don’t
want casual sex.4 Back in the 1970s and 1980s, psychologists conducted a study
in which an opposite-sex partner offered college students casual sex. All of the
women declined, whereas three-quarters of the men accepted.5 This could be
interpreted as evidence that women are biologically driven to guard their eggs
and virtue vigilantly and to tolerate sex only in return for marriage or money. At
least, that is an easy conclusion to jump to under the influence of social
messaging that hammers this idea home every day. But it’s also possible that the
women were scared: scared of social stigmatization or for their physical safety.
In a famous passage published in 1982, Margaret Atwood explains how when
she asked a male friend why men feel threatened by women, he said, “They’re
afraid women will laugh at them.… Undercut their world view.” But when she
asked some of her women students why women feel threatened by men, they
told her, “They’re afraid of being killed.”6
In their study, Baranowski and Hecht reproduced the finding that women
reject casual sex with an opposite-sex partner when propositioned in ordinary
social situations. But they took their research a step further, testing what would
happen if subjects received the same offer in an environment where they
believed they would be safe from physical harm and social stigma. In this study,
the huge gender disparity vanished. Women picked on average about three out of
ten men they thought were available for casual sex, whereas men picked on
average about four out of ten women. Twenty-nine of the thirty women in the
study said they would like to have sex with at least one of the men on offer.
Recent studies also raise complex questions about whether women are
biologically hardwired to prefer sexual monogamy. For example, psychologists
Meredith Chivers and Amanda Timmers conducted research that found women
to be genitally aroused by erotic stories about encounters with strangers as well
as with long-term partners.7
Bertrand Russell may have foreshadowed some of these findings, but
philosophizing about what women—or, for that matter, men—want in the
absence of empirical data is a risky business. That said, this risky business has
been going for a long time. Back in 1884, political philosopher Friedrich Engels
published The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, in which he
hypothesized that monogamy would arise “naturally” if only love, sex, and
marriage could be separated from concerns about property and inheritance,
because women and men would want monogamy under ideal conditions.8 He
claimed that “sexlove is by its nature exclusive” (although he noted that in his
time only women had realized this exclusivity), and so he predicted, “Remove
the economic considerations that now force women to submit to the customary
disloyalty of men, and you will place women on an equal footing with men. All
present experiences prove that this will tend much more strongly to make men
truly monogamous, than to make women polyandrous.” It’s unclear exactly what
counts as “all present experiences” here, though presumably Engels’s own
experiences are included.
Engels beat Russell to the idea that bourgeois monogamous marriage was
designed to assure men of paternity and secure the inheritance of property by
their biological male offspring. (Engels added that its other role was to ensure
that women provided men with unpaid domestic labor.) But on the question of
what women want, these two men had very different ideas, though both reported
basing their ideas on “experience.”
 But what if Russell and Engels were both wrong? What if there is no single
model of what women (or men) want? What if some of us “naturally” want
monogamy and others don’t? Perhaps Russell and Engels simply knew different
people, and that’s why “experience” delivered such different verdicts to them.
I’m just going to leave that idea there for now, but it will be important later.
While Russell was ahead of his time in some ways, in other ways he failed to
see where things were heading. What, against the backdrop of 1920s Britain,
must have sounded like a radical “free love” manifesto was not really as free or
as radical as it might have been. While he recognized that there was nothing
morally wrong with sex between two men, he still thought of romantic love,
marriage, and child rearing as limited to hetero couples—in fact, he found this so
obvious as to require no comment. Russell was radical for his time in defending
the idea that premarital sex should be acceptable for women as well as for men
and that marriage should not require sexual exclusivity. But for all he may have
been sex-positive by Victorian standards, he still thought sex without love was of
“little value.” And he still ultimately presented extramarital sex and love as
inevitable and forgivable rather than as things people might actively choose and
prefer for their own sake.

It Must Be Love

I’m disturbed by, but haven’t yet mentioned, another feature of Russell’s
philosophy of love. This one relates to a deep-seated assumption that is still
widely shared, which means it’s a bit trickier to bring to the surface. So I’m
going to approach it in a roundabout way, via what philosophers call the “union
view” of romantic love.
The union view says that romantic love consists in union with another person
and/or a desire for such union. (You might recall that Robert Nozick put forward
a version of this view.) Now, Russell himself doesn’t explicitly say union is the
defining characteristic of love, but he certainly thinks it is one of love’s
important features: he writes that love “breaks down the hard walls of the ego,
producing a new being composed of two in one.” He acknowledges the fear of
losing one’s own individuality in the process of becoming part of a “new being,”
but he calls this fear “foolish,” since “individuality is not an end in itself,” and
the loss of separateness is actually required for a satisfying life. Love, for
Russell, is “the best thing that life has to give.”
This sentiment might sound sweet, even cute. But it’s not. A word recently
coined by philosopher Elizabeth Brake describes Russell’s attitude here:
amatonormativity.9 This coinage derives from the Latin words amare (to love)
and norma (a standard against which things are measured). Amatonormativity
says that romantic love is the normal or ideal condition for a human life, so lives
that don’t include it are imperfect or abnormal. Russell’s amatonormative
attitude becomes especially pronounced when he says that those who haven’t
experienced mutual sexual love “cannot attain their full stature, and cannot feel
towards the rest of the world that kind of generous warmth without which their
social activities are pretty sure to be harmful.” He says, “The resulting
disappointment inclines them towards envy, oppression and cruelty.”
This is a horrible—and untrue—thing to say. Many well-adjusted, happy,
productive, and socially valuable people are single and haven’t been in love;
some by choice, others as it happens. Some of them are parents. Some care for
relatives or friends. Most are ordinary people going about their business. It is
outrageous to write them all off as “disappointed,” “envious,” failing to “attain
their full stature,” and harmful to society. But this is the consequence of
assuming that romantic love is required for a satisfying life. Like I said: not
sweet and not cute.
Russell’s amatonormativity gets even more alarming when you appreciate
that it encompasses his heteronormativity too. When he calls love “the most
fructifying of all human experiences,” he means what he elsewhere calls “serious
love between a man and a woman.” In a similar spirit he also denigrates the
childless, saying, “Sex relations which are serious cannot develop their best
potential without children and a common life.” (This dig hits me personally, as I
have no kids and no current plans to acquire any.)
Russell held dismissive and belittling attitudes toward various deviations
from what he regarded as the norm. While he was busy arguing for greater
acceptance of his own particular deviations, he might have done a better job of
noticing how he was recycling and reinforcing the exclusion of those who
deviate in other ways.
 Heroes and Humans

But I already said that Russell doesn’t belong on a pedestal. Nor does any
philosopher or, indeed, any human. Nevertheless, it’s a sad fact that philosophy
sometimes fosters a culture of hero worship around certain figures, whose
pronouncements—however awful, unoriginal, or just plain boring—come to be
treated as important by default. This is deleterious to great philosophy.
Unfortunately, the philosophy of love is an arena in which this problem has
really shown its true colors over the centuries. Its effects are bolstered and
concealed by the pretense that philosophy is a purely apolitical and rational
pursuit, in which approbation and canonization are accorded purely on the basis
of “merit”—not status, class, gender, race, or anything else.
In fact, philosophy has a long history of treating the ideas of men as agenda
setting, according women’s work a secondary place—or no place at all—in its
canon.10 Let me tell you about a recent book titled Love: A History by
philosopher Simon May.11 In this book, May traces “two millennia of Western
thought,” as the cover promises. It’s an impressive book from which there is
much to be learned. But here’s the thing: Love: A History includes ten chapters
that focus on specific named thinkers. Most of these chapters are about one
person, though a couple are about two. So all in all, twelve people get the honor
of appearing in a chapter title. And without exception, all twelve are white men.
They are, in fact, a selection of what we might call the “usual suspects”: Plato,
Aristotle, Lucretius, Ovid, Spinoza, Rousseau, Schlegel, Novalis, Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche, Freud, and Proust. When the dust jacket advertises the book as an
exploration of “the very diverse philosophers and writers who have dared to
think differently about love,” it prompts one to wonder what counts as
“diversity” in philosophy.
Women thinkers do not get chapters of their own in May’s Love: A History,
but women appear as a topic of discussion. There is a chapter titled “Women as
Ideals,” and there is an index entry for “women,” which includes subentries like
“as intellectual beings” and “as temptresses.” (There is no index entry for “men,”
and to my knowledge it has not often been up for discussion whether men are
“intellectual beings” or “tempters.”) May’s book reflects a pattern that it did not
create (but does help sustain). Understanding that pattern is important for
understanding the history of the philosophy of love. If we interpret it
incautiously, we risk coming away with the impression that the philosophy of
love is done about women rather than by them.
It is hard to know exactly what has been responsible for the devaluation and
exclusion of women’s voices in philosophy, though it is almost certainly a mix of
factors. Recent research suggests this stems in part from an ingrained association
between “genius” or “brilliance” and maleness.12 This association may not be
deliberate or conscious, but if you ask people just to close their eyes and picture
a “genius,” they are liable to picture an Einstein, a Darwin, or a da Vinci. If at
some level we associate being a great philosopher with being a genius, and we
also associate being a genius with being a (white) man, it is not surprising if
women somehow just don’t seem to strike us as great philosophers.
I also wonder if the image of analytic philosophy, in particular, as a male
activity may have had something to do with what Russell—a founder of the
analytic tradition—chose to classify as “philosophy” among his own writings. Is
it a coincidence that he categorized Marriage and Morals—which discusses
stereotypical women’s business like love, marriage, family, and gender—as not
being philosophy, reserving that label for his work on stereotypical men’s
business like logic, mathematics, and the mind?
Even now, some regard books like Marriage and Morals as off-limits for
“real” philosophy. In my opinion, philosophy is not so limited; only its
practitioners are. Philosophy itself has a lot of unrealized potential in this
domain.

Laurels and Facepalms

The situation I’m describing has impacted our collective philosophical

conversations. To see how, let’s take a brief tour through some murky corners of
the “canonical” philosophy of love. In The Gay Science Friedrich Nietzsche says
that he “will never admit that we should speak of equal rights in the love of man
and woman: there are no such equal rights.”13 He backs this up with the old
chestnut that love is not the same for men as for women: “What woman
understands by love is clear enough: complete surrender (not merely devotion)
of soul and body, without any motive, without any reservation.… [H]er love is
precisely a faith: woman has no other.” He adds that a woman “wants to be taken
and accepted as a possession” and draws a fairly explicit analogy between the
“perfect” woman in love and a slave. (By contrast, Nietzsche thinks that when a
man is in love, he wants devotion and surrender from a woman.)
This may all sound strange and horrifying, but it fits neatly into Nietzsche’s
broader thought. In Beyond Good and Evil, he speaks of woman’s
incomprehensibility and opines that her nature is more “natural” than man’s.
(These stereotypes are part of what Betty Friedan would later identify as the
feminine mystique.) He also provides a long list of women’s “causes for shame”
and rants that “her great art is falsehood, her chief concern is appearance and
beauty.”14 While reading such misogynistic statements from a philosopher who
is still canonized today can be shocking, it is perhaps more comprehensible
when one bears in mind that decisions about what belongs in philosophy’s canon
have proceeded hand in hand with the perception of philosophy as a primarily
male enterprise.
With a sense of how Nietzsche views women and men, we can also look to
his “definition” of love in another work, Ecce Homo: “Love, in its means, is war;
in its foundation, it is the mortal hatred of the sexes.”15 This is an ancient cliché,
and I mean “ancient” quite literally: the Roman poet Ovid discussed the same
ideas nearly 2,000 years earlier. Today, they survive on the websites of men’s
rights activists. The idea that love is a sex war is not even the most bizarre claim
about love in Ecce Homo. One contender for that title is Nietzsche’s assertion
that women all love him except for the infertile ones. If we stumbled upon these
sentiments published unattributed on a random website, we would hardly take
them for the thoughts of a great philosopher.
Like many canonized heroes, Nietzsche has apologists who will argue that he
didn’t mean what he appears to be saying in his misogynistic passages. Some say
that he was really a feminist. If so, he was a feminist who was not very good at
explaining feminism: he attributed calls for women’s emancipation to the fact
that defective (i.e., infertile) women hated other women who had turned out well
(i.e., reproduced). But perhaps we mustn’t take these things out of context?
Perhaps they’re ironic? One constantly hears such excuses for misogyny.
There is another possibility, though: Nietzsche thought he had figured out a
way to send different audiences the different messages they wanted to receive.
He might have been trying to invent the two-tone political dog whistle. Pssst,
feminists: it’s ironic, of course! Pssst, misogynists: finally, someone is brave
enough to tell it like it is! But if such ambiguity is supposed to feed us what we
want to hear, it leaves me completely unsatisfied. The philosophical tradition in
which I was trained values clear and careful expression because in its absence
one risks being seriously misinterpreted. And even before I knew there was such
a thing as philosophy, I learned from my mother—who learned it from her
grandmother—that there comes a point when you have to say what you mean
and mean what you say.
Another canonized philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, wrote in The World as
Will and Representation that however lofty or ethereal we might think it, love is
really just “a more definitely determined, specialised, and … individualised
sexual impulse.”16 In particular, it is a heterosexual impulse: “merely a question
of every Hans finding his Grethe.” (True to stereotype, only Hans has agency in
the search process: Grethe, we must suppose, waits patiently to be found.)
Schopenhauer, like Nietzsche, sees himself puncturing a grand illusion. But
he too is just recycling stereotypes, including this one: “By nature man is
inclined to inconstancy in love, woman to constancy … for nature moves her,
instinctively and without reflection, to retain the nourisher and protector of the
future offspring.” Conveniently, this means that “faithfulness in marriage is with
the man artificial, with the woman it is natural, and thus adultery on the part of
the woman is much less pardonable than on the part of the man.” These
assumptions about what is “natural” for women and men presage contemporary
discussions about what we’re biologically “designed” to do; in particular,
Schopenhauer’s emphasis on humanity’s impulse and instinct for reproduction—
a drive, so to speak—foreshadows the contemporary metaphysics of love put
forward by Helen Fisher. In many respects, Schopenhauer was only a
mouthpiece for social norms that long predated him and have long outlived him.
His sexism is uncritical, and so is his heteronormativity.
The problem is that Nietzsche and Schopenhauer are “A-list” philosophers:
celebrities of the philosophy world, considered “geniuses.” Their thinking has
shaped perceptions of romantic love, human nature, women, and philosophy
itself. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer each get a chapter of their own in Love: A
History.
Both, like Russell, were the beneficiaries of multiple forms of social
privilege; they were white, male, and middle- or upper-class. But in a sense this
put them in a position of philosophical disadvantage. One’s privilege can make it
harder to get critical insights into the things affected by that privilege, for the
simple reason that the workings of privilege are usually far easier to notice and
understand when you are not their beneficiary. Beneficiaries of privilege often
are not even aware of its existence: they have never needed to be. To compound
this problem, it can be deeply uncomfortable to regard one’s favorable position
within a social structure as due to privilege rather than solely one’s own merits
and efforts. So the beneficiaries of privilege can be strongly motivated to ignore
it. If you are trying to figure out how romantic love works at a time when it is
intimately bound up with sexism, heteronormativity, and other systematic
oppressions, privilege is a philosophical hindrance.17
The upshot of all this is that in order to do great philosophy of love these
days, we need to turn to more sources than just philosophy’s canon. And within
philosophy, we need to look beyond just the usual suspects. We need to clear a
path through the tired old tropes that have been blasted on repeat for so long to
seek out some of the more interesting, less trumpeted voices.

A Sense of What Matters

It’s not all Nietzsches and Schopenhauers in the history of the philosophy of
love. Simone de Beauvoir addressed romantic love as part of a wide-ranging
philosophical investigation of gender, and she developed conceptual resources
for understanding both love and gender that are of importance for philosophy
today (up to and including this book). In her best-known work, The Second Sex,
de Beauvoir was among the first to develop the idea of gender as a social
construct, which she summarized in her famous statement that “one is not born,
but rather becomes, woman.”18 She identified various traits that we associate
with womanhood: fragility, unintelligence, and unsuitability for leadership, for
example. And she discussed the treatment of women as “other”: that is, defined
by their relationships to men, or what differentiates them from men, rather than
as full subjects in their own right. Then she made the case that having particular
genitalia at birth does not naturally or biologically determine such things.
Instead, they are imposed by the society around us as we grow up. For instance,
if boys’ education is taken much more seriously than girls’, it is not surprising if
women then strike us as being less intelligent. (This echoes a theme in earlier
work by pioneering philosopher of gender Mary Wollstonecraft.)
De Beauvoir’s views on romantic love are not rose tinted. In “The Woman in
Love,” a chapter of The Second Sex, she points out that Nietzsche’s description
of what love is like for women is actually not far off the mark when considered
critically, as a description of love in a deeply problematic society (rather than the
“natural” order). Romantic love, as de Beauvoir sees it, is damaging and
dangerous to both women and men. It encourages women to seek their own
annihilation through absorption into a man’s life and identity—otherwise, they
risk being seen as unwomanly. But this is devastating to all the things that de
Beauvoir, as an existentialist, considers necessary for an “authentic” life, in
particular the freedom to choose one’s own path. Moreover, women in romantic
love are taught to see their male partners as impossibly idealized, since
otherwise their own annihilation would be too obviously irrational. But no man
is impossibly ideal. The inevitable failure to live up to the prescribed manly role
in patriarchal romantic love thus ultimately makes love deeply damaging for
men as well. However, de Beauvoir includes one note of optimism: she says that
one day, when women and men can approach each other as equals, love will
become a source of life (rather than mortal peril).
Philosophers have put the idea of social construction to work in considering
many topics besides gender. For example, Lucius Outlaw, Charles Mills, and
others have argued that race is a social construct. In this book, when I discuss
romantic love as a social construct, I owe much to the philosophers who
developed and refined this conceptual resource for me to work with.19
We can also find fascinating—and sometimes even stereotype-defying—
work on the philosophy of love in much older texts. Plato put love (of various
kinds) at the center of his philosophy, and intriguingly he put a woman
philosopher of love at the center of his most famous work on the topic, the
Symposium. He has the character of Socrates credit a priestess called Diotima—
possibly a fictionalized version of someone Plato knew—as the source for the
most serious and original theory of love that appears in the work. Diotima’s
theory of love is complicated and strange to modern ears, but one of its
interesting features is the idea that all humans are pregnant either in body or in
soul, and love brings forth their offspring (be it children, art, or philosophy).
Back in the present, philosophers are still at work figuring out what love is.
In her recent book On Romantic Love, philosopher Berit Brogaard has defended
the view that romantic love is a kind of emotion.20 This classic philosophical
view of love faces many challenges (including Fisher’s argument that love is a
drive). Brogaard develops a version in which emotion of romantic love can be
either rational or irrational, which she thinks is important because “rational love
leads to happiness,” but “irrational love does not.”
Several other contemporary philosophers of love are also interested in the
rationality and reasonableness of love, and I find this trend interesting.
Psychologists Anne Beall and Robert Stern-berg can help us contextualize it:
remember their discussion of how the Enlightenment view of human nature as
fundamentally rational corresponds to the idea that love is ideally rational too?
The current tendency among philosophers of love to focus on love’s rationality
and reasons makes me wonder if there is some Enlightenment-like conception of
human nature at work behind the scenes in philosophy today.
As for me, when considering the relationship between rationality and love, I
am drawn to something Bertrand Russell once said in a television interview. He
was asked what messages he would want to send to future generations, and one
of the two he picked was “Love is wise, hatred is foolish.” I think his choice of
words here is significant. He didn’t say love was “rational” or “reasonable”; he
said it was “wise.” Why might that have been?
Well, we can step back here and think about the word “philosophy,” which
originally derives from a Greek word for love (the prefix philo- is related to
philia, meaning “friendly affection”) and a Greek word for wisdom (sophia). I
have found it helps to keep this definition in mind when navigating
contemporary analytic philosophy, which typically puts rationality and reason—
not wisdom—center stage. This phenomenon stretches beyond the philosophy of
love and has been bound up with analytic philosophy’s self-conception as a
logical, scientific, and apolitical enterprise.
I am a fan of rationality and reason, and I think they can be elements of
wisdom. But I don’t think they are all of it. Insightfulness can also be an
important part of wisdom. So can creativity, originality, and—a quality that’s
often overlooked—a sense of what matters. This last is particularly important for
thinking about love, when everyone has something to say and one of the biggest
challenges is curating a path through the mass of information and opinions. I
certainly think there is a place for questions about individual rationality and
reasonableness when it comes to understanding love. But—inspired by Beall and
Sternberg, de Beauvoir, and others—I also think it is important to keep a bigger,
societal picture in view.
Let me finish up with a recap of two morals from this chapter. First,
philosophers are not immune to making awful pronouncements about anything
and everything, love included. Just like the biology of love, the psychology of
love, the sociology of love, and every other ongoing cultural conversation about
love, the philosophy of love is often a messy bundle of uncritical assumptions
and flashes of insight. I see myself rummaging around in it like a pile of clothes
at a garage sale: I’ve found some gems in there but also a lot of stuff I have no
use for. And even with the gems—Bertrand Russell especially—I feel like I’d
need to take them home and give them a good wash before I’d be comfortable
wearing them. Philosophy has powerful tools to offer anyone who wants to
better understand the nature of love, but proceed with caution when reading what
philosophers have to say about it. This applies equally to the book you are
reading right now.
The second moral is that while I’ve found interesting gems, I have not found
what I’m looking for. My own sense of what matters keeps insisting that the
most urgent task facing a philosopher of love right now is to find a satisfying
resolution to this book’s central dilemma: How can love be both biological and a
social construct? That work is still waiting. It’s time to turn to it in earnest.
 4

Love Is as Love Does:

Love’s Dual Nature

What ever dyes, was not mixt equally …

—John Donne, “The Good-Morrow”

Having It All

Biological and social theories of love both tug on my heartstrings. When I notice
my heart beating faster at the thought of a loved one or feel the rush of
adrenaline when we are together after an absence, I am drawn to the biological
view. There’s nothing socially constructed about this love that I’m experiencing:
this is a natural phenomenon. If I want to understand what’s happening to me, I
need to understand what my brain and my body are doing. Advances in
biological and psychological sciences are making it clearer and clearer that a
human in love is just what every other human is: an animal with a biology and a
complicated evolutionary history. These features of ours are natural. They are
discoverable. If we do good enough science, we’ll figure them out.
Then again, when I get frustrated with the social norm of universal
monogamy and hearing about how being in two relationships means I’m not
“really” in love, it seems obvious that romantic love is what we—collectively,
socially—make of it. We may have chosen to make it monogamous, but it
doesn’t have to be that way. There’s this package of traditions and expectations
that we’ve bundled together and labeled “romantic love,” and it gives our society
a certain structure. But as soon as we know a little history, sociology, or cultural
anthropology, we see clearly that this isn’t the only way a society may organize
itself.
This is enough to land me squarely in the dilemma set up in my first two
chapters. How can love be both biology and a social construct, when biology is
not a social construct? The dilemma presents us with a series of choices,
arranged roughly as follows. (These things aren’t perfectly aligned but broadly
correlated.) On the one hand, we could approach love as a natural phenomenon.
We could start from the assumption that it is universal (or nearly so) in our
species. We could attempt to learn more about it by studying individuals
belonging to that species, deploying the methods of natural science. On the other
hand, we could approach love as a social construct, starting from the assumption
that it is localized to specific cultural contexts. We could try to learn more about
it by studying societies, deploying the methods of the humanities and social
sciences.
It’s tempting to try to have it both ways: to say that love is both biology and a
social construct. In fact, quite a lot of theories of love initially sound like they’re
trying to do just that. But—disappointingly—on closer inspection it usually turns
out that either they aren’t saying this at all, or they never explain how it’s
possible. The desire to have it both ways is fairly common, but coming through
with the goods is much more challenging.
One way of gesturing at the idea that romantic love is both biological and
social is to say that society or culture shapes how love is expressed, while love
itself is an underlying biological phenomenon.1 This downplays the importance
of the social side of love, however, relegating it to mere expression. It is a truism
that culture shapes expression. The wisdom that I’m looking to preserve—that
romantic love is a social construct—is not a truism (and it’s not about
expression). Another such gesture is to say that culture—art and literature, for
example—can be a source of clues about what love must be like.2 But this,
again, downgrades the role of culture to signposting: something that just
provides us with pointers to where the real (biological) action is.
On the other hand there are those who gesture toward both the social and
biological but ultimately opt for a social theory of love. One version of this
strategy is to say that romantic love is a social invention, albeit one prompted by
biology. In this kind of approach, the biology of love gets downgraded to a mere
historical precursor.3
The third common strategy is simply to state that love is both biology and
society without doing anything to resolve the appearance of contradiction this
creates.4

Stand Back: I’m Going to Try Metaphysics!

There is still work to do. This is conceptual work: we need to reexamine our
ways of thinking about love—about what is real and what isn’t, what is natural
and what isn’t—in order to make sense of what looks like a contradictory
situation. It is, in fact, just the kind of work metaphysicians do.5
I propose a new theory of romantic love. At its core is the idea that romantic
love has a dual nature: it is ancient biological machinery embodying a modern
social role. The real conceptual work, however, is to see how love’s dual natures
fit together. Here it helps to think of an actor playing a role in a TV show. As
you’re watching the show, you might notice various things about the character:
his haughty behavior, perhaps, or his complicated relationships with the other
characters. At the same time, you might notice various things about the actor: his
smoldering eyes, as it might be, or his almost unsettling facial symmetry. There’s
nothing strange about the fact that in watching the show we notice features of the
character as well as features of the actor. It would be strange, however, to ask
which one we were really looking at, the character or the actor. As soon as we
understand the relationship between actor and role, that seems like a silly
question.
Romantic love is like this. Some of our ancient, evolved biological
machinery—a collection of neural pathways and chemical responses—is
currently playing the starring role of Romantic Love in a show called Modern
Society. As we watch this show play out, we might notice various things about
the social role (the “character,” as it were): the way it structures a society into
nuclear families, maybe, or its complicated relationship with gender. At the same
time, we might notice various things about the biology (the “actor”): the
involvement of dopamine, say, or the brain regions that are implicated.
The crucial point is that nothing determines that one of these aspects of love’s
nature is what love really is to the exclusion of the other. Of course, we could
decide to use the phrase “romantic love” only to talk about the social role or only
to talk about the biological machinery. But the current meaning of that phrase is
vague and imprecise: it doesn’t force either interpretation. The full story will be
one about love’s dual nature.
Love’s biological machinery is something natural, which we discover rather
than create, to be studied primarily by the natural sciences. It is something we
would expect to be a human “universal” in the sense of being consistent across
time and place, though we can still expect to see interpersonal variation, as with
other aspects of our biology. It is something we can investigate by studying
individuals, while acknowledging that it is also important to understand how we
have evolved as a species.
Love’s social role, on the other hand, is (at least partly) an artifact, which we
create in the process of setting up a societal structure, to be studied primarily by
the humanities and social sciences. And it is something we would expect to be
localized to specific times and places, though we should anticipate influences
and similarities across time and place, as with other aspects of culture. It is
something we can investigate by studying societies, while acknowledging that it
is also important to gather a diverse range of individual perspectives.
What does all this mean? Well, it means it is right to say that romantic love is
a social construct. And it is also right to say that romantic love is a biological
phenomenon. Most importantly, we’re not contradicting ourselves in saying so,
any more than we’re contradicting ourselves when we point to our TV screen
and say, “There’s William Shatner!” then go on to say, “There’s Captain Kirk!”
What’s on the screen? William Shatner embodying the role of Captain Kirk.
What is love? Ancient biological machinery embodying a modern social role.
Omit either half of the description, and you just aren’t seeing the full picture.

Who’s Running This Show?

Appreciating that love has a dual nature is just the beginning. We immediately
need to ask a few crucial follow-up questions. The most important is, Which of
love’s features belong to its social nature, and which belong to biology? We
know that the line “Beam us up, Scotty!” is part of the script for a character
(Captain Kirk) but that the particular mouth we see on the screen speaking that
line is the mouth of an actor (William Shatner). We understand how the
interactions between the two can make for great television. We need to think
about love the same way: to identify what is part of the social script, what is
contributed by the biological actor, and how these things interact. Among other
things, this is essential for understanding what kinds of control we have over the
nature of love and what love could become in the future.
Let’s think about the idea of control. In understanding that love has a partly
social nature, we open the door to critical examination of the particular way
romantic love currently structures social life. We acknowledge the possibility of
real, substantive change. Feminists have critiqued the role of romantic love in,
for example, creating and maintaining harmful gender norms, and queer theorists
have critiqued its role in, for example, justifying homophobia. These efforts have
resulted in real changes to the script: real changes to what love is (and what it
does) at the social level.
When it comes to the biology of love, however, it’s much less obvious that
such control is possible. Our brain chemistry evolved long before contemporary
social structures and may well outlast them. By appreciating the biological
aspect of love, we can get a handle on what persists through social change. This
is fascinating in its own right, but it too has practical implications in terms of
what we can and cannot control. Sometimes knowing our own biology may
reveal limitations on what kinds of change are feasible (at least until we can alter
our biology). In other ways, the biology of love can provide motivations for
change; I’ll come back to this later in the book.
Unless we’re careful, though, it will be all too easy to attribute things to
biology that we actually have no evidence are biological. Humanity has a long
and embarrassing history—that isn’t over—of coming up with “biological”
theories of x that have no grounding in reality or evidence but “feel right”
because they gibe with the dominant ideology of the moment. Biological
theories of race are used to justify slavery or mass incarceration. Biological
theories of gender are used to justify rape or depriving women of education and
property. History testifies that once we are ideologically invested in a status quo,
we try very hard to prove—with biology—that it is the “natural” order of things.
This enables a dominant ideology to reinforce itself: prejudices and injustices
appear immune to criticism or challenge if attributed to a biological or natural
cause. For example, if we can convince ourselves that women are biologically
different from men in ways that make them bad at mathematics and politics but
good at child care and laundry, then we can justify a social structure in which
women do all the (unpaid, repetitive) household labor: it is the “natural” state of
things. Any attempt to change this situation is “going against nature,” which will
make everyone miserable and is doomed to failure because you can’t change
biology.
If we want to do the philosophy of love well, we ignore this history at our
peril. Like gender and race, romantic love is an intense focus for values, political
convictions, and emotions. This creates the perfect storm when it comes to
attempting to discover the biological reality of love. We have already seen some
ideology-driven accounts of how love “naturally” is. Recall, for example, Arthur
Schopenhauer’s thesis that love is all about “each Hans finding his Grethe” and
how he insisted that monogamy was much more “unnatural” for men than for
women.
To add one more recent example, clinical psychologist and couples therapist
Sue Johnson claims in her book Love Sense that humans in general are naturally
monogamous by biological design.6 In arguing for this claim, she emphasizes the
role of oxytocin in attachment and bonding, comparing us to prairie voles, who
bond in couples, raise offspring with their mates, and also produce oxytocin that
seems to play a significant role in that bonding process. However, prairie voles
are not monogamous—at least not sexually. Johnson does not think this impacts
her argument that humans are naturally monogamous, however. Her reasoning
on this point is not clear,7 which suggests possible interference from an
ideological desire to reinforce the current cultural norm of monogamy.
The interference between insufficiently examined ideology and what we feel
inclined to call “natural” or “biological” often runs very deep and makes itself
invisible from the inside. This does not mean we should despair of the biology of
love. It just means we must try to approach it with awareness of the risks and
with a questioning, philosophical mind-set.

Nothing Artificial Added

To see what I mean, let’s return to Helen Fisher’s biological theory of love.8
Fisher says romantic love emerged during our evolutionary history “to drive men
and women to focus their mating attention on a preferred individual,” and so
“the brain circuitry for male-female attachment developed to enable our
ancestors to live with this mate at least long enough to rear a single child through
infancy together.” Right away in these passages, we see a strong association
between romantic love and reproduction. (Again, the theory of love on offer is
not far from that found in the K-I-S-S-I-N-G rhyme.) There is also an immediate
association between love and hetero coupling, conveyed in the unquestioned
deployment of phrases like “men and women” and “male-female attachment.”
Fisher goes on to associate the evolution of romantic love with specific
reproductive gender roles. She says the arrival of bipedalism in our evolutionary
ancestors “caused a problem for females: they became obliged to carry their
babies in their arms instead of on their backs.” And then these females “began to
need mates to help feed and protect them—at least while they carried and nursed
a child.” Here the evolutionary origins of love get tied to the idea that females
have a principal role in child rearing, and this renders them needy and dependent
on males. Fisher presents the nuclear family—and hence the evolution of
romantic love’s brain circuitry—as evolution’s solution to this female neediness.
Correspondingly, the “male-female attachment” she identifies as the sequel to
“romantic love” normally lasts approximately four years—just long enough to
get a child through infancy.
Fisher also strongly associates romantic love with monogamy, which in turn
gets linked back to female neediness. She says that with the arrival of
bipedalism, pair-bonding became “essential” for our female ancestors. By
contrast it only became “practical” for males. (The relevant practicalities are
gestured at in asides like “How could a male protect and provide for a harem of
females?” But I’m not sure what this kind of rhetorical question is supposed to
establish, since in many species—humans included—this model has often been
realized.)
In short, Fisher’s whole account of the evolutionary origin of love is infused
with norms around gender, reproduction, heterosexuality, and monogamy. All
these norms happen to be the ones that are familiar from our own contemporary
cultural setting. But what, really, is the biological evidence that female neediness
is part of the natural order of things and the true evolutionary basis for romantic
love? Fisher pictures a bipedal hominid who must carry a baby in her arms,
imagines her being unable to thrive without relying on a male provider, and
proceeds from there. But the “naturalness” of this picture may owe much to the
social conditions in which we now find ourselves. After centuries of preventing
women from owning property, being educated, working outside the home, and so
on, it may well seem “natural” to think of women as needy and dependent: we
are conditioned to see women as only suited to full-time child care while a man
takes care of business. We see this pattern wherever we look, whether we’re
doing big things like electing officials or appointing CEOs or small things like
deciding whom to hold the door open for in a corridor. And we’ll see it when we
are doing science.
As a philosopher, I have come to think that the biology and evolution of love
are important for understanding what love is. That’s why I think it’s important to
get them right. This means we have to go by what the evidence actually shows
rather than by what feels “natural.” Fisher’s hypotheses may sound “natural,” but
they raise a lot of questions in my mind.
For example, Fisher estimates that bipedalism began among our ancestors
around 3.5 million years ago, and she proposes that something recognizable as
romantic love evolved between 1.8 and 1 million years ago, following the advent
of language, which led to protracted childhood and hence—as she sees things—
the need for a longer-term partner. But if over 1 million years passed between the
arrival of bipedalism and the evolution of love, then there must have been other
solutions to the problem of having one’s hands full of babies that worked well
enough to keep hominid evolution going for over 1 million years. What about
extended infancy meant that we couldn’t extend those solutions? And if
bipedalism posed such a problem for female ancestors specifically, how come
we didn’t end up with male-only bipedalism? Why doesn’t the development of
universal bipedalism better support the speculation that child care was already a
cooperative enterprise?
Moreover, if bipedalism was making life difficult for mothers carrying
children in their arms for an extended period, would evolving a whole new
fundamental biological drive have been a more efficient solution than the
invention of a simple technology, such as the baby sling? In fact, drawing on a
variety of research in his recent book The Artificial Ape, archaeologist Timothy
Taylor places the invention of the baby sling earlier than 1.8 million years ago.9
If he is right, then by the time Fisher says romantic love was evolving (1.8 to 1
million years ago), the problem of bipedal mothers having to carry babies in
their arms instead of on their backs could already have been solved.
Even setting aside technology, evolving a whole new fundamental biological
drive would be a pretty extreme solution to a problem that could be solved in
simpler ways, such as through cooperative social child-rearing in nurseries. How
often does evolution take a sledgehammer approach to a problem when efficient
alternatives are available?
 The Standard Model Comes as Standard

My guess is that the true story of love’s evolution will turn out to be a lot more
complicated than bipedal mothers having their hands full. One possibility is that
adult cooperation is beneficial to our species, and for this reason we evolved a
whole suite of brain mechanisms that promote social bonding through the
formation of cooperative groups that include—but are not limited to—nuclear
family units. The biological machinery of romantic love can then be understood
as part of a complex system of overlapping mechanisms that evolved for the
promotion of social bonding and cooperation in various configurations. This
would deliver a better explanation of what really happens, as it would explain
the coexistence of both “traditional” nuclear families and various other models.
It wouldn’t require us to think of romantic love as a sledgehammer evolutionary
response to a single problem (and, what’s more, one readily solvable by other
means): romantic love would instead emerge as part of a larger cooperative
evolutionary strategy.
By contrast, what I call a “standard model” approach guides Fisher’s
philosophical work on the nature of love. This is the idea that one way of doing
things is “standard,” and all others are deviations. For Fisher, the “standard
model” is a hetero nuclear family model, complete with the reproductive gender
roles and monogamous norms familiar from our contemporary cultural context.
I’ve already unpacked the reproductive gender roles a little; let’s now turn to the
issue of monogamy.
Let’s agree that as we evolved and infancy began to occupy a longer period,
solo parenting would have become very challenging. The question is, Why
assume that monogamous coupling of the kind most familiar to us is the default
solution to that problem? Many societies have arranged child care in other ways.
Some, for example, form polygamous family units. (This has typically been
patriarchal polygamy: one man with many wives, and not vice versa. But bear in
mind that most monogamous societies have practiced patriarchal monogamy,
where women are controlled by their husbands.) Fisher says polygamy is a
“secondary strategy” for human social organization, but it is controversial among
anthropologists whether this is so. Some believe polygamy is the primary human
strategy. There is also a case to be made that a third strategy—namely, a
collective social approach—can be a better solution to the challenges of child
rearing in a state of nature than either monogamous or polygamous family units,
and that this collective approach may have been a “primary” strategy in our
evolutionary past.10 There have also been polyandrous societies, where women
have multiple male partners. These are rarer, but recent research has found that
they are not as rare as previously thought, and they occur worldwide.
(Intriguingly, polyandry does not generally give rise to a gender-flipped
patriarchy; it is more common in egalitarian societies.)11
Child rearing is hard. It’s a small step to conclude that it’s best accomplished
through cooperation, which we already know humans are good at. It’s not
obvious, however, why we should think there is a single “standard model” for
how humans will cooperate to raise children. Even less obvious is that the
standard model would just happen to be the one that is culturally dominant
around here these days, as Fisher seems to think. But rejecting Fisher’s standard
model doesn’t mean we should conclude that some other model is standard. In
Sex at Dawn, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá say, “The amoral agencies of
evolution have created in us a species with a secret it just can’t keep. Homo
sapiens evolved to be shamelessly, undeniably, inescapably sexual.”12 They go
on to suggest that monogamy is a struggle because it goes against our nature.
Here we’re being offered another one-size-fits-all picture of human “nature,”
just a different one. It’s almost as if Fisher were claiming that blue is the natural
eye color for humans, and then Ryan and Jethá, noting that a lot of humans have
green eyes, were countering that green is the natural eye color for humans. For
some people, monogamy really doesn’t seem to be a terrible struggle. They say it
feels perfectly “natural” and delightful and right.
In new work, psychologists Rafael Wlodarski, John Manning, and Robin
Dunbar have defended the idea that there are two different “phenotypes” when it
comes to “mating strategy” in humans: the monogamous type and the
promiscuous type. They construct a case that both men and women are split
between the two types, with 57 percent of men preferring promiscuity, compared
to 43 percent of women. They presented this work in a 2015 paper titled “Stay or
Stray? Evidence for Alternative Mating Strategy Phenotypes in Both Men and
Women.”13 But as the title suggests, the paper compares only two models of
relationship preference: long-term monogamous bonding on the one hand and
short-term promiscuous bonding on the other. People with a preference for
lifelong nonmonogamous bonds are somehow not on the radar. Nor are people
with a preference for short-term serial monogamy. In fact the authors collapse
the whole idea that there is a difference between number and duration of
relationships, leading them to make claims like, “Humans actually consist of a
mix of short-term (promiscuous) and long-term (monogamous) mating
phenotypes,” as if “long-term” and “monogamous” were synonyms. To me, as a
polyamorous reader in two long-term relationships, this just sounds like a
conceptual confusion.
It’s tempting to seek simple models that we can easily understand, but the
realities of romantic love aren’t simple. Oversimplifying a complex situation is
not good science, and it’s not good philosophy either. I have yet to see
convincing evidence that a single standard model for human relationships is
hardwired into our biology. Positing two types is a step in the right direction, but
a very small one. As a species, modern humans are a romantically diverse bunch.
What “comes naturally” to us varies: our infinite variety cannot be reduced to
one or two standard models.

To the Exclusion of All Others

We’ve seen how a biological theory of romantic love can be deployed to connect
love with specific gender roles and with monogamy. It can also be used to
connect gender and monogamy with each other. For example, Fisher thinks that
female neediness is the reason romantic love evolved and thus ultimately is what
caused our ancestors to become monogamous. Nowadays, we are strongly
socially conditioned to see monogamy as a thing that women desperately want
and men grudgingly agree to. But what evidence is there, really, for the claim
that women want monogamy?
Some contemporary research suggests the opposite: that women can struggle
with monogamy at least as much as men do. Hetero women are apparently much
more likely than hetero men to experience a loss of sexual desire in long-term
monogamous partnerships. Psychologist Dietrich Klusmann investigated survey
data from 2,500 participants and found that men and women reported equal lust
for each other at the beginning of a relationship. However, as the relationship
progressed, “a marked decline in sexual motivation occurred in women but not
in men.”14 Other research casts into doubt the assumption that female sexuality
is typically directed toward established intimacy. When psychologists Meredith
Chivers and Amanda Timmers found that hetero women were often genitally
aroused by erotic stories about encounters with either their long-term partners or
male strangers, they also observed that erotic stories about the subjects’ friends,
despite all the established intimacy, did not elicit comparable levels of genital
arousal.15
The methodological question of where to look for evidence of women’s
supposed “natural” preference is important. Strong social pressure to have (and
express) preferences for monogamy creates conditions under which it is
complicated to find out what women “naturally” prefer: simply asking what they
want is prone to elicit the conditioned answer. We need a subtler approach: a
search for clues. By measuring things like the drop-off in women’s desire for
long-term monogamous partners or their arousal by erotic stories about
strangers, we can gather indirect evidence that may point to a rather different
pattern of “natural” preferences behind the social conditioning.
We must also confront another problem with Fisher’s standard model
approach at this point. Just as we can question the assumption that romantic love
is grounded in women’s natural need for monogamy, we can question the
assumption that romantic love is naturally geared to heterosexual reproduction.
Fisher’s mentions of same-sex romantic love in Why We Love are minimal and
rather give the impression of being afterthoughts.16 Indeed, given her standard
model, Fisher has to treat same-sex love as a sort of deviation from the species
norm, requiring an explanation at the level of individual developmental
difference. She says, for example, that “gays and lesbians in all cultures also feel
romantic passion.… During development in the womb or during childhood they
developed a different focus for their passion.” Same-sex love, in Fisher’s picture,
looks like an individual misfiring of machinery that evolved in our species for
the purpose of heterosexual reproduction.
But same-sex love only calls out for explanation in terms of individual
deviation if hetero reproductive coupling is built into the “standard model” to
begin with. Given that we are strongly socially conditioned to expect romantic
love to be hetero by default, we should be wary of assuming that biology made it
so. We need to see the evidence. Once again, however, when we look at what we
really know about biology and evolution, alternative explanations are readily
available. Suppose romantic love evolved to promote intense—often sexually
cemented—bonding between individuals leading to cooperation in a range of
activities (including child rearing, among other important things). This gives us a
more inclusive theory out of the box. If we didn’t set out by assuming that love
was originally all about “male-female” reproductive coupling, then we wouldn’t
later need to backtrack to try to accommodate queer love as some kind of
deviation.
The scientific method exhorts us to seek evidence for our hypotheses rather
than trusting hunches. This is nowhere more important than in the science of
romantic love, which is politically loaded, hugely important socially, and
intimately connected with our deepest ideas about human nature, gender, child
rearing, and what makes for a good life. This is exactly the sort of area where we
are terrible at having accurate hunches, but our terrible hunches keep being
presented to us as objective science.

The Composite Image

Our hunches about love don’t appear out of nowhere. We have been provided
with a theory of what love is since before we can remember. Think back to the
K-I-S-S-I-N-G rhyme. Something as simple and apparently innocent as that
rhyme packs in a lot of information about what love is (and what it does). The
rhyme serves to create an image of love—equivalent in essentials to Fisher’s
standard model—in the minds of children and to sustain this image as it gets
passed down through generations.
And a huge range of other cultural products contribute to the same end:
everything from high art (think of the two figures in Klimt’s The Kiss and how
much information the representation of their gendered bodies conveys) and
literature (Romeo and Juliet is the ultimate classic heteroromantic tragedy) to
religion (we could spend years unpacking the Adam and Eve story and its
influence on romantic gender roles) and popular rom coms (When Harry Met
Sally, not When Harry Met Barry, and certainly not When Harry Met Barry and
Sally). Then there are all the Valentine’s Day shop window displays, the
relationship advice columns, the engagement ring ads, and the endless
unsolicited information on “what women want” and “how to keep your man.” It
goes on and on. The character Kilgrave in the TV series Jessica Jones is not too
far off the mark when he says, “I am new to love, but I do know what it looks
like. I do watch television!”17
All these representations of romantic love add up to a composite image of
what romantic love is like. I use the metaphor of a composite image to invoke
the way that, when thousands of individual representations are overlaid, patterns
or contours will gradually emerge. Imagine building a composite image of a
person by overlaying a thousand photographs of different people who all share a
similar chin shape but have different hairstyles. In the composite image, the
contours of the chin will emerge as a clear feature, but the hair area becomes a
fuzzy mess.
We need to look for the emergent contours in the composite image of
romantic love: the features that come through clearly when we overlay all those
representations that pervade our culture. One of these contours is the way
romantic love functions to organize a society. It serves to harness—we might
even say tame—a bundle of powerful (potentially disruptive) feelings and
desires, channeling them into a safe, stable, nuclear family structure. Love’s
connections to sex, marriage, and reproduction are all related to this. And while
romantic love emerges as something that allows individuals to exercise choice in
selecting a partner, it’s important to see how and why that choice is
constrained.18 It is part of romantic love’s role to regulate sexuality and intense
bonding by encouraging its development within just one structure—the
permanent, heterosexual, monogamous couple (the kind of unit that heads up a
“traditional” nuclear family)—while discouraging all other formations. Often
there are other restrictions in play as well (based on race and class, among other
things). The privileged formation is the one favored with the fullest and easiest
access to social and legal benefits, such as marriage; the one that we must
choose to minimize the risk of potentially devastating social stigma and
rejection; and the one that is most widely and openly represented and celebrated
across all forms of art, culture, and social life.
My point here is not just that this formation is being valued and promoted at
the expense of others. It is,19 but, more relevantly, all this representation and
celebration of one particular formation are contributing to making romantic love
what it is. This is the mechanism by which we collectively, as a society, create
and sustain the strong contours that emerge in our composite image of romantic
love. The image changes over time, and it is to a large extent under our
collective control. But it shapes and defines what love is (and what it does) at the
social level, providing us with a script that we are supposed to follow.
 A Little Biology Goes a Long Way

Many of the features Fisher attributes to love’s biology may indeed turn out to be
part of the story of what love is—but more plausibly attributed to love’s social
script. Fisher wouldn’t be the first—and won’t be the last—to build more into a
biological theory than really belongs there. There is no compelling evidence that
all of our current nuclear norms for monogamous hetero reproduction have been
programmed into love by biological design, but these norms are deeply
ingrained elements of the social script for romantic love. They are among the
strong contours that emerge in the composite image. That doesn’t make them
any less real, but it is nevertheless an important difference from a metaphysical
and practical perspective.
I am basically persuaded by a subset of Fisher’s biological theory of love: the
parts where I can see robust connections to the evidence. Let me recap what
these are and explain why they are so important. First, I am convinced by
Fisher’s evidence that romantic love often involves particular brain regions and
chemicals. This helps us understand the physical similarities between romantic
love and other things. (Oxytocin, for example, is involved in both romantic love
and parental bonding; dopamine is involved in both romantic love and the
reward system more generally.) Thinking of love in this way can also serve to
remind us that, like all aspects of human biology, the biology of love varies from
person to person.
Second, I agree with Fisher that the biological mechanisms involved in
romantic love evolved over millions of years. We don’t have to accept Fisher’s
specific explanations of why they evolved in order to appreciate that they did.
This is important because it means the biology of love was emerging under very
different conditions from those in which we now live, which is exactly why we
should be wary of projecting elements of contemporary society onto biology.
Knowing all this is important because knowledge is power. Uncovering the
biology of love is a step in dismantling the romantic mystique: the
disempowering idea that love is an incomprehensible or magical thing we should
not think too much about. Let’s not forget that it took many years of serious
scientific research to convince (most) people that there is no biologically
superior race or gender. Getting a proper grip on the biology of love may help us
unravel the idea that there is one biologically superior way to love.
 But romantic love has a social function in addition to its biological profile: to
take as input the attraction and affection that arises between adults and produce
as output something resembling the nucleus of a nuclear family. This is the
respect in which love is like an actor playing a character: there’s the social role,
and then there’s the biological machinery playing the role. The work of Fisher
and other biological scientists is important, but it only speaks to half of this
story.
Now, it’s not a total coincidence that certain actors get picked to play certain
roles. Actors have features that make them a great casting choice for one part
and a bad fit for another. Similarly, it is not a total coincidence that certain
biological states in us play the social role of romantic love. But just as some
casting decisions are better than others, so there can be a mismatch between
love’s biology and the social role it’s expected to play. For one thing, society
changes very rapidly compared to biology; what may once have been a good
casting choice can quickly become a bad one.
We need to be able to explore these questions about the interactions between
biology and society without pressure to choose one or the other as love’s “real”
nature. On the contrary, we must reconcile the insights and wisdom contained in
both biological and social theories of love. We must apply social critiques to
biological theories and vice versa without declaring either half of the equation
intellectually bankrupt. And throughout this process we have to accommodate
variety: at the biological level, at the social level, and in the interactions between
the two.
I custom-designed my theory of romantic love to create a space for all of this.
We can no longer make do with half a theory—not if we have set our sights on
the big picture: love in all its incredible diversity. And not if we want to
understand not only what love is but what it could be.

Rebel Without an Answer

If I know anything about romantic love by now, it’s that it’s not a one-size-fits-
all phenomenon. Still, I’m left with a question: Does it fit me? Is the love I feel
for my partners “romantic”?
My answer is—predictably—twofold: yes and maybe. The yes is for the
biological aspect. I’m pretty confident my biology looks the way the biology of
romantic love is supposed to look. Now to be fair, I haven’t scanned my brain to
check exactly what’s up in there. However, I can report that it really feels like
the dopamine, the oxytocin, and so on are doing their thing. I’ve been in
monogamous love before, and it felt very similar. So I’m going to go ahead and
say the biology is happening. The actor is on set.
As for whether it’s playing the right social role to count as romantic love in
my time and place, that’s where I get the maybe. I’m not sure. It’s not ruled out:
my composite-image theory of the social construction of romantic love allows
that not all of the “normal” features have to be present in every case. (Many
couples count as in love who are of the same gender, have no plans to get
married or have children, or in other ways don’t fully conform to the script given
to us by the composite image.) But monogamy may still be too close to being a
core norm, here and now, for my situation to be clear-cut. As one indicator of
this, in On Romantic Love Berit Brogaard classifies nonmonogamous
relationships as an “in between case” of love, along with situations where
someone is “just not that into you.”20 Perhaps monogamy is still so firmly built
into the script that my biological actor doesn’t count as playing the Romantic
Love role in the Modern Society show.
But what do I care about modern society? Can’t I just be a carefree rebel?
Well, no. Maybe I can be a rebel, but I can’t be a carefree one. In the society I
inhabit, it’s impossible to avoid the psychological impact of amatonormativity—
that idea that if you’re not in romantic love, or at least looking for it, then you’re
doing life wrong. While I don’t agree with that on an intellectual level, the
internalized attitude is hard to dislodge. The assumption is so prevalent among
almost everyone I interact with that it’s impossible to ignore, regardless of
whether I personally agree. In the same vein, I can’t just stop caring about
monogamy norms because too many other people care about them. And last but
not least, it’s impossible for me to stop caring about whether my situation counts
as a genuine case of romantic love because I know that its being recognized as
such could be a powerful way of convincing people to take my relationships
seriously.
So I’m sad about the maybe. But while my philosophizing isn’t giving me the
answer I initially wanted, it’s giving me much more than that. It’s giving me
glimpses into what the real questions are and why they matter. Philosophy, once
again, hasn’t let me take the easy way out—and I appreciate it even more than I
would have appreciated getting the answer I hoped for.
 There is good news in the mix. Romantic love has the potential to be a far
more inclusive phenomenon than normally assumed. Based on my thinking so
far, I am coming to understand just how much capacity love has to change.
Love’s social role, at least, is quite malleable. Perhaps love’s biology is too: the
science is advancing to the point where such things are not unrealistic. Whatever
I might find unsatisfying about love right now, I don’t have to assume it will be
that way forever. And that is a hopeful thought.
With this hope in mind, over the next few chapters I’ll take a look at some of
the ways romantic love has changed over the years and what kinds of change are
still needed.
 5

Under Construction:
Love’s Changing Role

For stony limits cannot hold love out,

And what love can do, that dares love attempt.
—William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Which Kind of Stupid Are We?

Once we have a grasp of love’s dual nature, we can rethink the whole idea that
biological and social theories of love are in competition with each other.
Where did that sense of rivalry come from? Perhaps it’s just that people love
to sort themselves into binary categories: “Liberal” or “conservative”? “Male” or
“female”? “Gay” or “straight”? We do it even when the binaries obviously don’t
make much sense: “cat person” or “dog person”? This phenomenon has recently
manifested in the form of coffee shop tip jars that come in pairs, offering
customers a quick hit of binary choice: “Sun” or “rain”? “Chocolate” or
“vanilla”? The mechanisms that prompt us to do this in all areas of life have
probably also helped inculcate the idea that we have to choose “Love is biology”
or “Love is society.”1
The thing is, anytime we make such a choice—especially about something
important—it’s easy to begin to feel like part of an in-group, with those who
make the other choice forming an out-group. This encumbers us with a
temptation to demonstrate, to ourselves and everyone else, that our in-group is
superior and the out-group is inferior. In fact, we can quickly become
unreasonably resistant to any evidence to the contrary.2
I have no objection to leveraging this element of our psychology to secure
tips for baristas, but I do worry when it seems to be hampering our efforts to
understand a complex world. The appearance of competition between biological
and social understandings of love weakens both enterprises. In efforts to prove
the out-group is inferior, social theorists of love can be dismissed as
“unscientific” and “uninformed,” while biological theorists can be labeled
“unsophisticated” or “uncritical.” Instead of learning from the insights of
whichever group isn’t our own, we simply write each other off as one or another
kind of stupid.
We must resist this temptation. We stand to learn far more about love if we
do, especially when it comes to understanding how and why love changes over
time. Appreciating that process of change requires appreciating how love’s
biological nature and its social role fit together and what happens when they pull
apart.

Aliens Versus Nineteenth-Century Lesbians

Imagine that, on another planet, there is an alien society very much like
contemporary North American society. It’s replete with alien rom coms, alien
weddings, alien genders (associated with distinct reproductive roles like ours),
caring alien relationships, monogamous alien pair-bonding for life as a cultural
norm, and so on. In other words, imagine an alien culture that’s constructed a
social role for romantic love exactly like the one we have here and now. But
suppose the biological machinery that makes up these aliens is completely
different from ours. Instead of dopamine and oxytocin, the aliens might have no
chemicals in their brains at all. Perhaps their heads are filled with a system of
levers and pulleys. Or perhaps they don’t even have heads.
The question is whether these aliens are capable of falling in love or not. If
love is something in our biology, then we ought to say these aliens don’t fall in
love: they aren’t made of the right biological stuff. Maybe they fall in something
that looks like love, but to say they literally fall in love would be a bit like saying
they have “heart attacks” just because they sometimes fall down clutching the
places where their hearts would be if they had hearts (which they don’t). No
hearts, no heart attacks. No brain chemistry, no romantic love. So says the
biological theory.
On the other hand, if love is a social construct, we should say the aliens do
fall in love: they are doing everything right. They meet “the one,” care very
deeply for that one, form a bond, build a life, get alien married, raise alien spawn
together, and so on. Just as different actors can play Hamlet in different
productions, different kinds of biological machinery can play the romantic love
role in different creatures. Or so says the social constructionist theory.
But instead of choosing between biology and society, I am saying that
romantic love is ancient biological machinery embodying a modern social role.
This gives us a slightly more complicated answer to the question of whether our
aliens really fall in love. The answer is yes and no: these aliens fall in love at the
social level but not at the biological level. For the dual-nature theorist, asking if
the aliens fall in love is a bit like looking at two different actors playing Hamlet
and asking if they’re “the same guy.” Here too the answer is yes and no: same
character, different actor.
What if we took things in the other direction, keeping the biology the same
but changing the social role? What if someone was in just the right kind of
biological state to count as being in love but was prevented from participating in
the social role of romantic love because the role excluded certain people? For
this scenario, we don’t need to reach for science fiction. Consider, for example,
the situation of a lesbian couple in late-nineteenth-century England. Suppose
they are in love biologically speaking: the parts of their brains associated with
romantic love are active, and they are under the influence of oxytocin,
dopamine, and so on.3 But inflexible heteronormative restrictions on the social
role of romantic love prevent these biological states from doing what they would
otherwise do: they prevent the women from marrying, from expressing affection
(except perhaps clandestinely), from parenting together, or from forming a
nuclear family. Social norms severely curtail their ability to engage in any of the
kinds of bonding associated with romantic love.
Anne Beall and Robert Sternberg—the psychologists who defend a social
constructionist theory of love—mention this kind of case as an example of how
love changes along with the culture of which it is a part. They note that some
women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries experienced, and
described in their writings, emotionally intense relationships with their female
friends, which included physical elements like kisses and caresses. However,
they did not classify these as experiences of being in love. At that time the social
role of romantic love simply did not allow for same-sex cases. It wasn’t even up
for discussion; romantic love was treated as being obviously and definitively
“love between the sexes.”
The social role of romantic love in UK society has since expanded to create
room for the inclusion of lesbian romantic love. Since 2014, women in England
have been able to marry other women if they choose. While discrimination
persists, this represents a huge cultural shift in the social role of love over a
couple hundred years.

Jailbreak My Heart

Knowing a little history teaches us that the social role of love changes over time.
It takes more work to understand why and how.
When describing nineteenth-century lesbians from our contemporary
perspective, we may want to say, “They were in love,” because they met all the
conditions from our point of view: they were in a state perfectly suited to play
the social role of love as it exists here and now. That state just couldn’t play the
social role of love as it was constructed back then, with its built-in
heteronormativity. Since the nineteenth century there has not been a biological
change to the way queer people work; society changed, and the social role of
love changed within it. Considering nineteenth-century lesbians makes clear (in
a way that considering hypothetical aliens doesn’t) what is at stake in this
process of change. It reveals that we have choices and responsibilities. We can
construct love’s social role in ways that tend toward exclusion, repression, and
oppression or toward inclusion, expression, and equality.
Social constraints can be powerful, but love’s biology is powerful too. No
amount of determination to construct a social role for love that excluded queer
people managed to shut down the biological machinery of queer love. Over time,
the biology won out: the social role expanded to become a better fit for love’s
biological reality. This is one reason why I think it is crucial not to treat romantic
love as purely a socially constructed phenomenon. Being able to see the complex
back-and-forth between love’s biology and its social role is important for
understanding why these changes to the social role of love happen: why love
breaks free from social constraints at the insistence of its biology.
Notice, though, that in order to understand the biology of love as a
motivation for social change in this way, we need to rid our biological theory of
love of the kind of ideology-driven assumptions that would cloud such
understanding. The neurochemistry of love, we now know, looks much the same
in queer and nonqueer lovers. This is part of the biological story of what love is,
and it gives us a basis on which to argue for the social inclusion of queer love.
But if we had always assumed love was restricted to hetero couples as a matter
of biological necessity, we might never even have been motivated to research
that question. Instead, we would have given ourselves a “biological” basis for
rejecting the social inclusion of queer love without further investigation.
People have been excluded from the social role of romantic love for all kinds
of reasons: queerness is one, along with belonging to different social classes,
different religions, or different racialized groups. Dubious “biology” has
frequently supplied excuses for such exclusion. And yet the real biology of love
is precisely why none of these exclusive practices is ultimately sustainable. None
of these social constraints on the role of romantic love have succeeded in
preventing people from experiencing the rushes of adrenaline, dopamine,
oxytocin, and so on. People (biologically speaking) keep falling in love even as
they (socially speaking) are denied access to it.
You may now be wondering whether, if the biology of love insists like this,
that means we should adopt an attitude of biological determinism. That is to say,
should we conclude that the biology of love will eventually win out over any
efforts we make at the social level to control or constrain it?

Lovers Gonna Love

We can summarize this attitude of biological determinism with the phrase

“Lovers gonna love.” This is shorthand for the idea that love just happens: it is a
biological force of nature, under no one’s control, and so we can’t really do
anything to change or contain it. If, for example, falling in love makes people
obsessive, volatile, or dangerous to themselves or others, or if it makes women
better nest makers and men better providers, then that’s just how it is. Lovers
gonna love.
 Uncritical biological determinism is a dangerous business. Some people are
biological determinists about gender roles too: they will say that men are
biologically more competitive, aggressive, unfaithful, and so on than women,
and nothing can change this because it’s just the way men are. They can then use
this idea to maintain and justify a status quo in which toxic behaviors get
downplayed on the grounds that they are “only natural” and thus impossible to
rein in. In fact, biological determinism about gender and biological determinism
about love often go hand in hand: “Lovers gonna love” tends to line up neatly
alongside “Boys will be boys.”
At the extreme, versions of both can be deployed to justify or excuse violent
crime. The idea of a crime of passion and the related legal defense of
“provocation” have served disproportionately to secure lenience for men who
violently killed or injured their adulterous wives and/or the men with whom their
wives were being adulterous. The attitudes behind this have a long and sexist
history. In England in the early eighteenth century, the lord chief justice called
sex with another man’s wife “the highest invasion of property” (because women
were property) and said that since “jealousy is the rage of man,” the violent
killing of someone caught in the act of committing adultery with one’s wife
should not count as murder. In his own, more graphic words, “If the husband
shall stab the adulterer, or knock out his brains, that is bare manslaughter.”4
Attitudes have changed to some extent: for example, women are less often
explicitly described as property now, at least not out loud, in public, by chief
justices. In some contexts the law has changed too, though only quite recently.
Since 2010, there is no longer a defense of “provocation” in UK law. The stated
aim of this change was to “end the injustice of women being killed by their
husband and then being blamed.”5 Canada restricted the provocation defense in
2015 to “those situations in which the victim’s conduct constituted an indictable
offence … punishable by five years or more in prison.” This conduct must also
be of the sort that would “deprive an ordinary person of the power of self-
control,” and the accused must have “acted on it on the sudden and before there
was time for their passion to cool.” Previously, Canadian law required only the
second two conditions, which meant, in principle, that your husband might use
legal actions you had every right to perform—such as saying something that
made him think you were having an affair—as a partial legal defense for killing
you.6
In the United States, the Model Penal Code does not explicitly use the word
“provocation” but does permit leniency for killings committed “under the
influence of extreme mental or emotional disturbance for which there is
reasonable explanation or excuse.”7 This has enabled juries to reach verdicts of
manslaughter (rather than murder) in cases where a man killed his wife or
girlfriend and claimed “extreme mental or emotional disturbance” because she
had left him, didn’t love him, planned a divorce, danced with another man, and
so forth.8 The language of provocation is employed more directly in federal
sentencing guidelines by the US Sentencing Commission, which allow that “if
the victim’s wrongful conduct contributed significantly to provoking the offense
behavior, the court may reduce the sentence below the guideline range to reflect
the nature and circumstances of the offense.”9
Provocation also serves as an excuse for lethal violence against queer men. In
England, men who turn violent when confronted with “sodomy” (especially of a
son by another man) have used versions of the provocation defense for centuries.
In contemporary cases, “gay panic” is a legal defense of provocation (or the
equivalent) used to help excuse a straight-identifying man who kills a queer man
after the latter has made an unwelcome advance. As law scholar Kyle Kirkup has
pointed out,10 killing someone out of anger specifically inspired by sexual
orientation could be construed as a hate crime. Seen in this light, homophobia
should be seen not as the basis for a legal defense but as the opposite: an
aggravating factor.
Progress on these issues is slow. In 2014, California blocked uses of the “gay
panic” defense and the corresponding “trans panic” defense (deployed in a
similar way to excuse the killing of trans* people). The California Penal Code,
which allows for a verdict of manslaughter in cases of killing “upon a sudden
quarrel or heat of passion,” was amended to note that “the provocation was not
objectively reasonable if it resulted from the discovery of, knowledge about, or
potential disclosure of the victim’s actual or perceived gender, gender identity,
gender expression, or sexual orientation, including under circumstances in which
the victim made an unwanted nonforcible romantic or sexual advance towards
the defendant.”11 The rest of the United States lacks such protections.
The pace of change is glacial because entrenched ways of thinking about
“human nature”—especially when it comes to anything related to love, sex, or
romance—are extremely resistant to change. Ingrained attitudes about what
lovers are “naturally” like can be very difficult to remove fully from our
nonconscious minds, even if we consciously disagree with them.12 Meanwhile,
romantic relationships continue to be significant sites of deadly violence—
disproportionately for women. In 2013 in the United States, among female
murder victims whose relationship to the killer was recorded, 36.6 percent were
murdered by their male partners; 245 male murder victims were recorded as
being the husband or boyfriend of their killer, while 992 female victims—over
four times as many—were recorded as being the girlfriend or wife of their
killer.13
What are we to do with this potentially dangerous “lovers gonna love”
attitude that is so strongly associated with excusing violence? We need to tackle
every claim about what is hardwired in us with critical thinking and moral
judgment: critical thinking because some of these claims about hardwiring will
just be false, and moral judgment because not everything that’s “natural” is a
good idea. We cure “natural” illnesses with artificial medical interventions. We
make an effort to rise above our “natures” when there is good reason. When it
comes to feeling angry enough to kill your unfaithful spouse, there is good
reason. When it comes to excluding queer people from the social institution of
romantic love, there is no legitimate reason at all. In both of these cases, I
suspect “nature” is responsible for far less of what we observe than we’ve been
encouraged to suppose. But we can only figure all this out through the exercise
of critical thinking and moral judgment. We have to do that work. Biology isn’t
any kind of shortcut to an answer.

Only Biology Is Biology

Straightforward biological theorists of love place everything about love’s nature

on the biological side. For them, the deterministic thinking of “Lovers gonna
love” is always within easy reach. Straightforward social constructionists place
everything on the social side. They always have a ready argument against the
idea that “lovers gonna love.”
But the dual-nature theorist has neither of these simple options. The dual-
nature theorist must figure out what belongs to the biology of love and what
belongs to its social script. She can acknowledge that societies will never
eradicate the biology of love in queer people just by excluding them from love at
the social level, while simultaneously challenging the idea that male murderers
should be treated leniently provided they were sufficiently enraged by their
partners’ behavior. I find it helpful to bear in mind the slogan “Only biology is
biology.” That’s a tautology, of course, but it is also a way of focusing one’s
mind on this question of what really belongs on the biological side of the ledger
and what doesn’t. The brain chemistry of queer love does. Lenient sentencing for
violent murderers does not.
When Helen Fisher claims that, as a matter of biological fact, romantic love
evolved because our bipedal female ancestors were needy and had their hands
full of babies, we should bear in mind that “only biology is biology.”
Associations between romantic love and female neediness may well turn out to
fall on the social side of the ledger; the history of love is littered with attempts to
attribute to “nature” what are really social prejudices. A trial judge whose ruling
was appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court, resulting in the landmark
case Loving v. Virginia, which in 1967 overturned antimiscegenation laws in the
United States, had infamously attributed the prohibition of interracial marriage
to the natural order of things (which, in turn, he attributed to divine will):14

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and
he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with
his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that
he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

In reality, the prohibition of interracial marriage is a chapter in the story of

love’s social role. Attempts to claim otherwise may look laughable now, but they
are not ancient history: it was only in the mid-1990s that the approval rate for
marriage between blacks and whites climbed to over 50 percent.15

Disappearing Love

There is a persistent idea that romantic love should unite two people of the same
“kind” (with the exception of gender). This has been an important aspect of the
social role of romantic love—and in some contexts it still is. The role has often
built in restrictions to exclude love between people from different social classes,
different religions, different racialized groups, and so on.
In 2001, clinical psychologist Maria Root published Love’s Revolution:
Interracial Marriage, based on analysis and interviews with around two hundred
participants.16 Root’s discussion gives us clues as to how social attitudes to both
interracial and same-sex relationships contribute to constructing the social role
of romantic love. Although the two cases are different in many important ways
(and intersect to create situations that are different again), Root notices an
important similarity: among participants in her study, both kinds of relationships
led to “legal consequences or the invocation of religion as a higher moral
authority,” and both “were often dismissed as merely sexual, as a way to
undermine their legitimacy and potential for success and happiness.” Here Root
puts her finger on a common strategy for undermining the legitimacy and
viability of any relationship that challenges the prevailing ideologies: the refusal
to acknowledge love.
Love’s social role is to take adult attraction and affection and output
something resembling a stable nuclear family unit. Where there is resistance to
the formation of family-like bonds between queer people or between people
racialized into different groups, there is a corresponding resistance to the idea of
romantic love between such people. This can take the form of mere disapproval,
but even more powerfully, it can take the form of denials that such love is so
much as possible. This then leads to the conclusion that any queer or interracial
relationship must really be a matter of sexual attraction alone. Because of
negative attitudes toward sex in general, this incurs disapproval and disrespect.
The desired—and likely—consequence is that, under such pressure and without
the normal social supports, the relationship will be unable to fulfill the social
function of creating a stable family unit. In terms of Beall and Sternberg’s social
constructionism (explored back in chapter 2), we can identify this as one of
society’s regulative mechanisms for stamping out disfavored manifestations of
love.
In order to fully understand these refusals to acknowledge love, we need to
appreciate their significance in terms of what love is (i.e., what love does) at the
social level. Sometimes denials of love are obvious and deliberate, explicitly
overriding what the lovers themselves say. Family members may simply tell a
queer or interracial couple that they aren’t in love—that it’s just lust, confusion,
or the work of Satan. There are also subtler, more insidious ways of making love
disappear, just by failing to acknowledge its very possibility. But they all serve
the same end: averting disruptions to the current social structure. Changing love
means changing our social world and, as such, will always be unwelcome in
many quarters.
 By looking at the recent history of interracial love and queer love, we can
identify some major changes to romantic love’s social role (and corresponding
disruptions to prevailing social arrangements). There have been and will be
others. But these are enough to draw our attention to an important conceptual
question: If the role of romantic love defines what romantic love is at the social
level, then shouldn’t any change to the role mean that romantic love gets
destroyed and replaced with something else? How can romantic love be one
thing over time if it is under constant construction and reconstruction?
Well, many things—indeed, most things—change over time while remaining
one and the same thing. You, for example, can change your hair color or your
opinions without becoming a different person. Change is normal and doesn’t
always amount to replacing one thing with another. It’s no different for socially
constructed things. Take the game of soccer, for example. It is a social construct:
we make it what it is by deciding on its rules and traditions. Yet the game of
soccer can clearly change over time, acquiring different rules. We still think of it
as one and the same game that persists throughout these changes.
So why exactly do we say soccer is a single game that has changed over time
as opposed to one that is destroyed and replaced with a different game every
time there is a rule change? It’s because of two factors. First, the changes are
small and happen gradually, not in huge leaps. Second, these small, gradual
changes take place against a background of constancy: at any given time, the
majority of the rules of soccer aren’t changing, and this allows for some
adjustments at the edges.
The same goes for the social role of romantic love. We couldn’t replace every
aspect of love’s social role at once and still count it as the same phenomenon we
had before. But we can make small, gradual changes against a background of
constancy. This is then love evolving, not being destroyed and replaced.
We should predict that romantic love will continue to change, as it always
has. One person, book, or movie won’t change the social role of love overnight;
the changes will be gradual. But they will happen. And this is one reason why
understanding the dual nature of love is so important. Armed only with an
understanding of love’s biology, we are liable to conceive of love as a natural,
objective, and unchanging thing over which we have relatively little influence.
This strips us of the conceptual resources to predict and responsibly plan for the
ways love is going to change at the social level. So we end up stumbling through
those changes without awareness.
On the flip side, armed only with an understanding of love as a social
construct, we would lack valuable insights into the kinds of changes that might
actually work and represent a better fit, given the kinds of creatures we are. For
instance, we might want to effect social change so that we came to collectively
represent romantic love as the kind of thing one can “just snap out of” when a
relationship ends instead of experiencing months of heartbreak. But the
biological reality is that many people undergo significant chemical changes in
their brains when bonding romantically with others, and these have profound and
lasting effects. Making these biological love bonds cancellable at will just by
altering our social norms isn’t an option. Our biology puts some limits on what
social change can achieve and gives us clues as to when and how such change
can succeed.
In the future, we may find ways of interfering with the biology of love
directly using drugs or more radical interventions. (I’ll have more to say about
that later.) But we won’t find a way to circumvent the vitally important work of
understanding love’s dual nature. Only by appreciating this duality can we hope
to figure out, when love is going wrong, whether the problems stem from
society, biology, or a failure of fit between the two.
This work must be done because, as things stand, romantic love is failing us
in multiple ways. Let’s take a look at some of them.
 6

What Needs to Change

I strain my heart, I stretch my hands, And catch at hope.

—Christina Rossetti, De Profundis

Abjectly Obedient Women,

and Other Sweet Love Stories

They say that love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage. The horse-
drawn carriage resulted from artificially harnessing a biological organism to an
invented technology. The pairing was a success because it suited certain
purposes that people had in a particular social context at a particular period in
history. Times have changed though: nowadays horses and carriages are rarely
seen together. Carriages have evolved into cars. As for the biological half of the
pairing, it hasn’t changed much: horses are still pretty much just horses, relieved
of their carriage-pulling duties.
At a particular period in history, for certain purposes, some societies
harnessed romantic love to “traditional” marriage. I put scare quotes around
“traditional” here because it only recently became “traditional” in European
culture to marry for love. Marriage was more traditionally a property transaction,
in which a man gave a woman to another man. This doesn’t mean love in
marriage was unknown; of course, love can arise even in relationships that began
as property transactions. But we should be wary of reading too much romance
into apparently adorable stories of spousal love from a bygone age.
In The Marriage Book, Lisa Grunwald and Stephen Adler present one such
story, which they describe as one of “the most extraordinary gifts of
inspiration.”1 It is a story told by a Roman man in his eulogy for his wife. He
describes their excellent marriage, his affection for his wife, and his grief at her
death. The centerpiece of the story is that because the couple was childless, this
most dutiful of wives offered to divorce her husband and even to bring him
another woman to have children with. (She is assumed to be the infertile member
of the couple.) She would then help raise these children, taking on the “duties
and the loyalty of a sister and mother-in-law.”
What a striking act of loving self-sacrifice, we’re invited to think. But on
closer evaluation, we might notice how much the eulogy emphasizes the wife’s
“loyalty” and “obedience.” These are the first entries in a long list of her
“domestic virtues.” And we might notice that the husband has a temper, which
he says “flared up such that I almost lost control of myself” when she offered to
find him another woman. In fact, his loss of control in the face of extreme
emotion is a recurring theme in the eulogy: he also mentions that owing to his
wife’s death, he is subject to grief that “wrests away [his] power of self-control.”
We only have one perspective on this relationship. The husband was clearly
pleased with it. We are left to wonder what the wife might have said, if she could
speak to us without worrying what would happen if her husband heard her and
lost control of his emotions again. I hesitate to call a relationship explicitly
grounded in the “obedience” and abject self-sacrifice of one of its members an
inspirational example of ancient romantic love.
It is, in fact, a salutary reminder of how ancient gender stereotypes somehow
look more acceptable when we see them through the rose-tinted lens of a sweet
love story. If we unthinkingly recycle and romanticize the idea that abject
obedience is the highest virtue of a woman in love, we facilitate women’s abuse
and oppression within romantic relationships. The gender stereotype that infuses
this Roman man’s conception of a good wife is still with us thousands of years
later. It is an aspect of the social role of romantic love that needs to change.

If You Liked It, Then You Should Have Put a Ring on It

—
and Earned More Than Her
In our own era, romantic love is so strongly associated with marriage that in
2015 the US Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage equality was announced in
phrases like “Love just won” (President Barack Obama’s Facebook status update
on the day) and #lovewins (which quickly became a top-trending hashtag on
Twitter). An alien visiting Earth could reasonably have concluded that love and
marriage are basically the same thing around here. Indeed, the language of the
Supreme Court ruling confirms this impression:

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest

ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family … [M]arriage
embodies a love that may endure even past death.… [The] hope [of the
petitioners in this case] is not to be condemned to live in loneliness,
excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal
dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.

This passage can sound sweet at first glance. But read again, and you see how
the alternative to marriage (i.e., the alternative to love) is a life of loneliness.
That message is dark, and it is not subtle. When we celebrate this statement as a
beautiful piece of contemporary wisdom, we demonstrate once again that we are
willing to swallow quite disturbing ideas, provided they are packaged for us in
sweet love stories.
It’s true that in some parts of Europe and North America, living “in sin” with
a partner to whom one is not married is nowhere near as stigmatized as it was in
Bertrand Russell’s day. But the idea that love is supposed to lead to marriage is
still a central feature of contemporary social life, as will be familiar to anyone
who has seen a few rom coms, felt the pressure of families asking, “When are
you two going to get married,” or understood what Beyoncé meant when she
said, “If you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it.”
The assumption that love and marriage are basically the same thing—or
would be if you were doing life right—is damaging to the people who are in love
and still unable to marry, who are in love and have no wish to marry, and who
are married but receive only abuse from their spouses. This normative conflation
of love with marriage is another aspect of the romantic love role that needs to
change.
This is not a wholly separate problem from the gender stereotyping; in fact,
the two are intimately connected. For the last couple of hundred years, romantic
love has been supposed to lead not just to marriage but to a particular gendered
marital arrangement: the husband works outside the home and participates in
public life, while the wife provides free, unlimited child care and domestic labor.
These are not dead stereotypes. In hetero marriages, women are still held
responsible for the majority of child care and housework by default, even if they
also work outside the home. Women do significantly more housework across the
board than men do.2 Men face a corresponding default expectation that they will
“provide” financially.
In a 2015 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Marianne Bertrand,
Emir Kamenica, and Jessica Pan illustrate the tenacity of the idea that a wife
should not earn more than her husband.3 They analyze income data from the
United States ranging from 1970 to 2011. In the data for 1970, the wife’s
earnings very commonly made up less than 10 percent of household income.
From 1980 onward, the share of household income earned by the wife expanded
to be pretty much anything, provided it was below 50 percent. Even in the most
recent data (covering the 2008–2011 period), it is quite unusual for the wife to
earn more than half the household income. If the wife does earn more than half,
she most likely brings in only slightly more.4 Hetero married couples seem
strongly resistant to arrangements in which the wife earns significantly more
than the husband. The gender pay gap reinforces this status quo. (In the United
States, women on average earn seventy-eight cents for every dollar earned by a
man.5)
Worse still, Bertrand and her coauthors’ analysis of the data indicates that the
few wives who do earn more than their husbands also tend to do more of the
housework and child care than their husbands: they take on a “second shift”
when they get home.6 The authors hypothesize that this represents an attempt to
“compensate” for the threat they pose to gender roles. Perhaps unsurprisingly in
light of this, they also find that these arrangements lead to lower marital
satisfaction and a greater likelihood of divorce.
Gendered assumptions about how a romantic relationship is supposed to look
can have a significant impact on our lives even if we don’t notice it. One
fascinating study by psychologists Laurie Rudman and Jessica Heppen found
that women who thought of their romantic partners in terms of “chivalry and
heroism” (i.e., as knights in shining armor) were on average less interested in
pursuing high-status occupations for themselves and less ambitious when it came
to earnings, education, and leadership goals.7 (Men’s romantic associations did
not exhibit any such correlation.) But here’s the thing: only the women’s implicit
—unstated and possibly unconscious—associations predicted lowered ambition,
not their explicit romantic fantasies. Rudman and Heppen conclude that their
research confirms the existence of a “glass slipper” effect: socialization into
romantic gender norms leaves women’s ambitions tottering and limping along
but operates below the level of conscious awareness. It is hard to see the glass
slippers on our own feet.8

Saving Love from Itself with Simone de Beauvoir

Feminist philosophers have been discussing romantic love’s connections to

gender for a long time. In “The Woman in Love,” a chapter in her 1949 book
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir makes the case that patriarchal romantic
love encourages women to seek self-annihilation through absorption into the
identity of a male partner.9 For de Beauvoir, an existentialist, this is anathema to
an “authentic” life.
Importantly, though, de Beauvoir believed the damaging gender roles
associated with romantic love to be changeable. In her view, they are not
“hardwired” into us as part of our biology because gender roles in general are
not “hardwired.” De Beauvoir was an intellectual pioneer in developing the idea
that gender roles are socially constructed. I want to build on that idea by saying
that, in the process of constructing gender roles, we are simultaneously
constructing some of romantic love’s contours. As a result, love itself is
gendered at the social level: strong patterns emerge in the composite image of
love, prescribing different experiences of love for women and for men. Of
course in some instances individuals engage in gender role reversal. But the fact
that there is reversal shows that the gender roles are there and ready to be
reversed.
De Beauvoir thought that romantic gender roles could be transformed into
something more positive. Shulamith Firestone, a later feminist author, was not so
optimistic. In her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone called romantic love
“love corrupted by its power context” and “a diseased form of love” intended to
reinforce the power imbalance between men and women.10 As she saw it,
advances in civilization were destroying the biological basis for that power
imbalance, so it had become necessary to shore it up with social institutions.
Firestone thought romantic love was one such institution, along with the
patriarchal nuclear family. For this reason, she called romanticism “a cultural
tool of male power to keep women from knowing their condition.” She thought
it was unsalvageable.
Even today harmful gender stereotypes are associated with romantic love.
Should we conclude, with Firestone, that romantic love is unsalvageable? Or
should we follow de Beauvoir in thinking it can become something better?
I’m with de Beauvoir here. Social constructs are real, but they are also
dynamic. In fact, looking back at Firestone’s work gives us some traction on this
point. Firestone defined romantic love as “love between the sexes.” This was not
unusual in the 1970s and earlier. But the social construction of romantic love has
already moved on to the point where this definition looks overly narrow; same-
sex love is now much more likely to be included.
Like the normative connection between love and marriage, romantic love’s
association with heteronormativity has been connected to its reinforcement of
gender roles. If it’s not necessary for love to involve one woman and one man,
how can it be necessary for it to involve one stereotypically womanly woman
and one stereotypically manly man? In fact, seen in the right light,
heteronormativity is just a form of romantic gender stereotyping: the “script” for
romantic love used to have two clearly defined roles for two clearly defined
genders. Start to question that, and you simultaneously challenge both
heteronormativity and sexist assumptions about romance. It’s a two-for-one deal.
Still, it takes time and effort—not to mention luck and good timing—to
change anything about the social role of romantic love. Persuading people to part
with their cherished ideas about it is hard, but any progress is exciting, and we
have witnessed some relatively rapid change of late. Large-scale moves toward
the inclusion of same-sex love have happened around me in my lifetime, and
comparable moves toward the inclusion of interracial love were happening in the
lives of the generation before me.
Philosophical reflection on love’s nature is timely precisely because romantic
love is in a period of such overhaul. Right now we are poised to learn the lesson
that love can change dramatically at the social level. Armed with that
information, we can begin to identify what still needs to change, and we can get
to work. Romantic gender stereotyping, the heteronormativity that still lingers,
and the assumption that love should lead to marriage are high on the list—and
they are all interconnected.
One crucial first step toward positive change is appreciating that romantic
love is not straightforwardly an individual or private matter. You cannot close
the doors of a home around a romantic relationship and imagine that this
prevents society from intruding. On the contrary, we bring it right in with us. We
literally bring into our homes the rom coms, romance novels, poetry, and myriad
other representations that contribute to our composite image of what love is. We
figuratively bring in all the expectations for a “normal relationship” that we have
been absorbing ever since we joined in playground renditions of the K-I-S-S-I-
N-G rhyme.
Taking charge, consciously, of the possibilities for change requires that we
first appreciate the sense in which it “takes a village” to fall in love.

All Else Being Equal

I have been able to watch the composite image of romantic love change over my
lifetime. Representations of queer love have become much more common and
much closer to “normal,” and as a result heteronormativity is no longer such a
strong emergent contour in the composite image. Even so, internalized
heteronormativity is hard to shift, which I can attest to on a personal level. I was
over thirty before I noticed a strange disparity: I was dating women and men and
had an online dating profile that mentioned that I was attracted to women, but it
had never occurred to me to update my profile—or my self-conception—to
anything other than “straight.” Once I noticed the disparity, I found it funny—
but the point is, I did not notice it for a long time. I had been so strongly
conditioned to assume I was straight that I kept doing so, even in the face of
fairly compelling evidence to the contrary.
Although we live in interesting times when it comes to love’s social role,
change happens against a backdrop of continuity. This continuity is not
necessarily a bad thing, and it’s part of what makes romantic love one thing over
time (something that persists through change rather than being destroyed and
replaced). But it means that efforts to include same-sex love have often involved
emphasizing that doing so helps promote other romantic norms, especially the
norm of monogamy.
Monogamy is currently a central feature in the social role of romantic love.
That role is about harnessing adult affection and attraction into stable nuclear
family units, which have a two-person nucleus. One effective strategy in arguing
for the inclusion of queer love has been to show that romantic love can perform
its social function better if it gets to work on the affection and attraction between
two queer folks as well as that between two straight ones. It can output more
monogamous nuclear family units that way, leaving fewer potentially disruptive
instances of attraction and affection that fall outside its remit. Emphasizing the
existence and moral rights of same-sex monogamous couples, who are a
relatively good fit for the current romantic love role, opened up the possibility of
making this small change while maintaining and even enhancing the other
elements of love’s social function.
For this reason, progress toward the inclusion of same-sex love has often
been premised on emphatic assurances of the continued exclusion of polyamory.
This is another thing that needs to change. Stigma against nonmonogamous love
is pervasive and unreasonable; psychologist Terri Conley and coauthors recently
conducted a study that found “monogamous relationships were rated more
positively than CNM [consensual nonmonogamous] relationships on every
dimension,” including with respect to factors wholly irrelevant to monogamy.
For example, they found that monogamous individuals are perceived as being
more likely to floss daily and reliably walk their dogs than individuals in
consensual nonmonogamous relationships. “Across all studies,” they report, “the
results consistently demonstrated stigma surrounding CNM and a halo effect
surrounding monogamy.”11
However, this kind of halo effect is not always obvious to the people who
enjoy its benefits. In a conversation about why she felt it was important to do
this research, Conley describes how people would tell her monogamy was really
the stigmatized option: “They said, Well, in Hollywood non-monogamy is all
people do, so it’s monogamy that’s stigmatized.… I always think that’s such a
crazy situation, when the dominant group actually thinks it’s being
persecuted.”12 Whatever is true in Hollywood, most of us do not live there. For
us, the stigma and social rejection that surround nonmonogamy carry costs that
are hard to count. My boyfriend’s father refuses to talk to him about anything
except the weather until he breaks up with me.13 We’ve been together for years,
and I’ve never met any of his family.
But rejection is not the only problem. If I had children, I’d be concerned that
my poly relationships could be used as grounds for taking them away from me. I
often wonder whether it would be legal for someone to fire me, or refuse to let
me stay at a hotel, or incite violence against me on the grounds that I have two
romantic partners. I’m happy to say those things haven’t happened to me, but
when I’ve discussed my relationships in popular media, I’ve received enough
anonymous feedback wishing bad things on me to make me conscious of safety
issues. Moreover, in many parts of the world adultery is illegal; in some it is
punishable by death. In the United States, at least, the anti-adultery laws are
rarely enforced.14 But it’s not exactly comfortable to know that I could be a
criminal in the United States when I only wanted to be a tourist.
All the stigma surrounding nonmonogamous relationships has given queer
activism a strong pragmatic reason to distance itself from nonmonogamy and
promote a narrative of queer love that very closely resembles “traditional”
monogamous romance. Queer poly people are particularly at risk in this
dynamic, becoming liable to be told that they are “ruining gay marriage for
everybody”15 and excluded from queer communities on top of already facing
multiple forms of stigmatization.
The rush to keep romantic love monogamous is not restricted to queer
activism, of course. It has been joined from all sides. Social conservatives are
motivated to join by the sentiment behind Jean-Luc Picard’s famous ultimatum:
“The line must be drawn here. This far, no further!”16 US conservative Eli
Lehrer wrote a HuffPost blog post in 2013 that appeared under the not overly
subtle headline “Gay Marriage Good, Polyamory Bad.”17 In it, Lehrer explains
that “gay marriage is, at the very worst, neutral for society while polyamory is
pretty clearly harmful to society.” The article is hard to read in a number of
ways; Lehrer is the kind of writer who will drop in a phrase like “handful of
backward Muslims” without missing a beat. More relevant for current purposes,
though, is what Lehrer thinks polyamory is. In one revealing passage he says,
“Polyamorous societies will, by definition, never have enough mates to go
around”; he adds, “Always and everywhere, this has resulted in significant
numbers of disaffected heterosexual males who have no hope of finding a mate.”
By definition? Lehrer is thinking of patriarchal polygamy, in which men can
have multiple wives but the reverse arrangement is not permitted. The people he
refers to as “mates” are, to be more accurate, women. It is simply not on
Lehrer’s radar that women could ever have multiple partners. This mistake alone
means that Lehrer’s argument makes no contact with its purported target: he is
not discussing polyamory; he is discussing patriarchal polygamy.
When Lehrer considers whether there are enough “mates” to go around, he
concludes that leaving distribution to the free market would inevitably lead to
some men not receiving their share. His concern is that those men will become
“disaffected” and then (presumably) bash things or upset the social order. The
argument is not original to Lehrer; it is a perennial trope. I’m interested not in
the failed argument per se but in the attitudes to gender that are revealed when
people discuss monogamy in these terms.
There are a number of issues to untangle. First, Lehrer seems to think that
men who are romantically frustrated are a terrible and dangerous force of nature
that no one can or should control. Perhaps I’m overly optimistic, but I don’t
think this is justified. I give men more credit than that: I think they are capable
of self-control, and I don’t assume violence is the inevitable consequence when
they don’t get the women they want or feel they deserve.
In addition to the misandry, there’s a strange conception of women—or
“mates”—as a kind of property or commodity that ought to be distributed among
hetero men in an equitable manner. Only once one is thinking of women that
way could it make sense to think of there not being enough to “go around.” Only
then could one countenance the legal enforcement of a redistributive policy that
would interfere with individual liberty.
Another well-known redistributive policy, structurally parallel to Lehrer’s,
maintains that we shouldn’t permit significant financial inequality. After all,
financially inegalitarian societies will, by definition, never have enough money
to go around. Always and everywhere, this has resulted in significant numbers of
disaffected people who have no hope of acquiring wealth. Should we conclude
that, because of the damage the disaffected poor may do to the fabric of society,
the state should intervene to limit how much wealth any one individual may
acquire? This would radically interfere with individual liberty, of course, but
Lehrer seems to think that serious state intervention is appropriate to ensure a
proper distribution of resources in such situations.
This analogy helps highlight the fundamental mistake behind the argument.
Wealth may or may not be a commodity suitable for state redistribution, but
women definitely are not. In untangling this kind of philosophical mess, that is
the most important thread to pull on. The rest of it unravels as soon as we do
that.

The Status of Sluts

While we’re on the subject of money, wealth and social class are themselves
important for understanding romantic love’s social function. For a number of
reasons, people are more likely to choose romantic partners of a similar
socioeconomic status (especially education level) to their own.18 Major changes
to this norm would present destabilizing risks to a society, as widespread love-
based marriage across status divisions would encourage greater social mobility
as well as serve to highlight the arbitrariness and injustice of status distinctions
in the first place.
Nevertheless, it has long been accepted that romantic love can in exceptional
cases cross barriers of class, wealth, and status. This idea might be as old as
romantic love itself: Cinderella-like folktales have been around for centuries at
least. (Notice, though, that the genders in the Cinderella story are a big part of its
“romantic” appeal: high-status women who marry low-status men are not viewed
in quite the same light.) The social institution of “morganatic” marriage—in
which a lower-status spouse and any offspring of the marriage are prohibited
from inheriting property and/or titles from a higher-status spouse—attempts to
alleviate some of the destabilizing impacts of love between partners of very
different status. The rate at which people marry outside their own social class
varies with time and circumstance.19 But the basic idea that love can conquer all
has never really gone away. In some ways, it has served as a model for “love-
conquers-all” narratives in other arenas (such as interracial and same-sex love).
Class status also has subtler influences on how romantic love works. For
example, it affects the ways in which one is liable to be penalized for violating
romantic norms. Sociologists have recently studied the relationship between slut
shaming and social class among college women, finding that high-status women
would call low-status women “slutty” in order to “assert class advantage” and
“defin[e] themselves as classy rather than trashy.”20 Violations of the norm of
romantic monogamy are commonly policed via the mechanism of slut shaming.
The findings of this study thus suggest that violating the norm of monogamy is
likely to carry a lesser penalty for those protected by higher social class.21
It also carries a higher penalty for women than for men. I call this the “slut-
versus-stud phenomenon.” It’s not hard to come up with a long and colorful list
of words that specifically denigrate promiscuous women. But what words
denigrate promiscuous men? A “rake” or “cad” sounds like the dashing antihero
in a P. G. Wodehouse story. A “playboy” or “player” sounds like somebody who
has a lot of fun. A “pimp” is a man who controls or manages sex workers, not
someone who is himself promiscuous. I’ve never heard anyone use the word
“gigolo” in real life. “Man-whore” is explicitly a masculinized version of a
feminine word. “Womanizer” might be the best candidate, but while derogatory
it lacks the vitriolic punch of “slut” (partly because it points to an activity rather
than an identity). And I don’t know of any words generally used to praise
promiscuous women in a manner comparable to the way “stud” is used for men.
The use of slut shaming to penalize women, especially lower-status women,
for (perceived) failures of monogamy is a blunt weapon. The concept of
“sluttiness” targets only sex, not love or relationships. In fact, however, this
makes it all the more effective, because it serves to reinforce the idea that
nonmonogamous relationships don’t count as love: they are really just sex. This
is a common strategy for making disfavored forms of love disappear, thus
reinforcing the exclusive contours of love’s social role.
With any movement that aims to make romantic love more inclusive at the
social level, there is a threat to social stability. In addition to the general
instability associated with change of any kind, love has a special place in
defining who we think we are and how we think we should live. Expanding the
social role of romantic love to include interracial relationships is highly
destabilizing to a social order that is rigidly segregated on racial lines. The
inclusion of same-sex love—and, more generally, challenging established
romantic gender roles—is similarly destabilizing to a social order that expects
wives to provide domestic labor for husbands who work outside the home.
Nonmonogamous love is interestingly different, however: it poses distinctive
destabilizing risks that strike directly at the heart of romantic love’s social
function, whatever kind of social order it is embedded within. If the social role
of romantic love allowed for polyamorous love, it could obviously become much
less effective at performing its core function of channeling affection and
attraction into stable nuclear family–like units. Many kinds of queer and
interracial love can be brought to fit the mold of the nuclear family. Others can’t,
but these have been successfully downplayed in the push for greater acceptance.
With poly love, it’s just too obvious that many or most forms cannot be squeezed
into the confines of the nuclear mold. While some poly people form nuclear
families, polyamory encompasses infinite possible configurations, and many of
them blatantly fail to conform to anything like the nuclear model.
 First Comes Love , Then Comes Marriage,
Then Comes Baby in a Baby Carriage

Because change happens against a backdrop of continuity, the inclusion of same-

sex love in the social role of romantic love has been promoted by reaffirming the
norm of monogamy. A parallel—but even less visible—phenomenon has been
the reaffirmation of amatonormativity (introduced earlier as the idea that
romantic love is ideal and a default for everyone) as part of the backdrop to this
change.
Just like normative monogamy, amatonormativity can be deployed to help
show how romantic love can better accomplish its social role if we make a
relatively small change to include same-sex cases. Here, the thought is that we
can more successfully prescribe romantic love as the ideal state for everyone if
we allow for same-sex love. That way, those for whom hetero love is not an
option can still be expected to conform to amatonormative pressure. Recall how
the US Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage snuck in the message that
the alternative to marriage is to be “condemned to live in loneliness.”
Once again, predictably, amatonormativity impacts differently according to
gender. While men may aspire to the status of “confirmed bachelor,” women are
given the prospect of becoming a “crazy old cat lady.” Even the simple word
“spinster” suggests a dull, sexless woman who is probably deeply weird in some
way: if you’re lucky, Miss Marple; if you’re unlucky, Miss Havisham.22
Amatonormativity is so common that it usually passes unremarked; even
extreme versions of it won’t so much as raise an eyebrow. And I don’t just mean
in café conversations, rom coms, or pop songs (though let’s not overlook the
powerful messages conveyed in lyrics like “You’re Nobody ’til Somebody Loves
You”). Casual amatonormativity is routine even in scholarly research.
For example, in a recent article discussing the theoretical comparison of
romantic love to addiction, Michel Reynaud and coauthors describe “love
passion” as “a universal and necessary state for human beings.”23 Note the
wording: passionate love is not just common; it is “universal.” And it’s not just
nice but also “necessary.” Now imagine—or perhaps this is already true of you
and you don’t have to imagine—that you have not been in love and have no
plans to be; you are happy in your relationships with your family and friends and
community, and you don’t think romantic love is something you want in your
own life. These scientists, in a single sentence, have both theorized you out of
existence and classified your life as inadequate.
Amatonormativity is so pervasive as to be more or less invisible except to the
people it most directly affects. For everyone else, it’s become like wallpaper:
however strange and ugly the pattern is, it’s there every minute of every day. If
you have no reason to notice it, you won’t. If we truly want to permit and respect
a diversity of life choices, we need to work at removing amatonormativity from
our composite image of romantic love.
But just as with monogamy, any challenge to amatonormativity poses a
distinctive destabilizing risk that goes to the heart of romantic love’s social
function. If romantic love works to channel adult affection and attraction into
stable nuclear family units, it is necessary to guard against people ending up with
either multiple romantic partners or none at all. The former task falls to the norm
of monogamy, the latter to amatonormativity. They are like twin gutters whose
job is to keep us all rolling down the same alley toward the same pins.
They are also some of the hardest aspects of love’s social role to see clearly,
precisely because they are some of the most fundamental. Social stability—
including the maintenance of privilege by the privileged—is best served by mass
unawareness of the deep core of the social machinery that structures our lives
and our loves. It is even more effective if we can attribute these deep-core norms
to “nature” or “biology” so that we’ll accept them as inevitable.
To round off this discussion, let me mention one more aspect of love’s
current social role that needs to change. At the moment, there are strong
normative connections between love and reproduction: specifically, the
production of biological offspring within a (hetero) marriage. My experience of
becoming a recently married woman in my early thirties came with a widespread
expectation that I would soon be having biological kids with my husband.
This default expectation that biological kids are on the horizon as soon as
love becomes serious—and especially once a couple is married—can cause
harm, both to adults and to children. It can lead people to have kids simply
because it’s expected rather than because it’s desired, and it imposes a sense of
inadequacy or failure on those who do not want or cannot have biological
children.
Like all the other issues we’ve looked at in this chapter, the reproductive
norm is gendered too. As Bertrand Russell pointed out back in 1929, though, it’s
far from obvious that it is gendered the right way around. Russell noticed that
people seemed to think women wanted children more than men did, but he said,
“My own impression, for what it’s worth, is exactly the contrary.… A woman,
after all, has to face labour and pain and possible loss of beauty in order to bring
a child into the world, whereas a man has no such grounds for anxiety.”24 It turns
out that statistics confirm his suspicion. Economist Marina Adshade pointed out
in a 2015 article in the Globe and Mail that the Statistics Canada General Social
Survey has for decades now included data on how Canadians answer the
question, “How many children do you plan to have, including the ones that have
already been born or you are expecting at this time?”25 The question was first
asked in 1990; back then, more men than women said they wanted children,
regardless of age or marital status.
However, by 2011 the percentage of men who didn’t want children had
almost doubled. Adshade has a hypothesis about this, based on something that
never seems to have occurred to Russell as a possibility: men taking
responsibility for child care. Adshade’s diagnosis of the data is simply that “men
have always wanted babies as long as women were willing to make all the
sacrifices. Now that those sacrifices are more evenly shared between parents, no
one should be surprised to learn that fewer men now want to have children.”
A more general moral is worth drawing out here. What is normative—in the
sense of being socially prescribed—does not have to be statistically normal.
Women normatively want children more than men do, but it doesn’t follow that
this pattern is statistically normal. Likewise, the perfect cereal-box nuclear
family—the normatively prescribed life choice—is actually a rare thing. Perhaps
this shouldn’t be surprising: if it were truly “natural” and desirable for all or
even most of us, we would hardly need all these social norms and penalties to
channel everyone toward it.26

Changing the Composite Image

In my time and place, the social role of romantic love—a composite image that
emerges from the overlaying of all our cultural representations, norms, and
narratives—builds in some features that are causing harm and need to change.
I’ve reviewed just a few in this chapter: the normative assumption that love
should lead to marriage and biological reproduction; the norm of romantic
monogamy; amatonormativity; and, permeating all of these while also
contributing further harms of their own, the stereotypical gender roles for
romantic love.
These social norms work together to make romantic love a powerful force for
the creation of “traditional” nuclear family units, causing tangible damage to
anyone caught in the crosshairs. The nuclear family model works well for a lot
of people. When it succeeds for you and the people you know, it can be nice to
imagine that success writ large as a template for everyone’s life. In fact, this
imaginative projection can be so gratifying that it becomes unsettling and even
scary to imagine accepting anything else as “normal.” But when we get down to
it, the nuclear family simply does not have the right to disparage or erase every
other model of what a good life can look like.
One theme underlies all the changes I’m advocating for here. None of them
involves restricting the role of romantic love or excluding anybody from it who
is currently included. If you are hetero and monogamous and want a completely
“traditional” marriage, then I say go for it. The social role of romantic love
should be fully open to you so that you can freely choose that option. In fact, you
can only ever choose that option freely if the norms that force your hand are
dissolved. If “traditional” is the only flavor of relationship readily available to
you, ending up with it isn’t exactly a choice. It is more like Henry Ford’s fabled
offer of a Model T in “any color so long as it’s black.”
In the next chapter I turn to the future of love (by way of some of its history).
We are constantly adding more and more layers to our composite image of what
love is. Old layers are fading out. We could ultimately dissolve each of the
damaging features of love’s social role if we wanted to.
But even granting that these changes to the social role of love are
individually possible, could we really make all of them? Would there be
anything left of romantic love if we did that? And while all this was going on at
the social level, what could—or should—we do about love at the level of
biology?
 7

It’s Love, Jim, but Not as We Know It:

The Future (via the Past)

Twenty love-sick maidens we,

Love-sick all against our will.
Twenty years hence we shall be
Twenty love-sick maidens still.
—W. S. Gilbert, Patience

Too Much Serenity Is Not Good for You

I know it’s cheesy, but I will confess that I like the Serenity Prayer. We all need
serenity to accept what we cannot change and courage to change what we can.
We also need wisdom to know the difference.
“While we cannot alter the nature of love,” write psychiatrists Thomas
Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, “we can choose to defy its dictates or
thrive within its walls. Those with the wisdom to do so will heed their hearts.”
They develop this philosophical thesis in their book A General Theory of Love.1
They are talking not about romantic love specifically but about loving
attachment in general. In their view, loving attachment is rooted in the “limbic
system,” a grouping of brain structures associated with emotion and motivation.2
But Lewis and his coauthors emphasize the role of art, as well as science, in a
full understanding of love. “Both are metaphors,” they say, “through which we
strive to know the world and ourselves.”
 A General Theory is a great read in many ways, and I am sympathetic to this
methodological effort to harness both arts and sciences. But it is unsatisfying to
me for several reasons. For one thing, the theory does not account for romantic
love’s dual nature; it neglects the socially constructed aspect. (While the authors
consider art as a source of clues, the only serious account of love’s nature on
offer is one about brain systems.) For another, the idea that love is ultimately
only approachable through metaphor—especially in combination with the idea
that we cannot successfully defy its nature and must accept it if we want to
“thrive within its walls”—is an analogue of the romantic mystique, something
we need to move beyond. The theory I’m offering in this book is not a metaphor
(although I sometimes use metaphors in an attempt to make the theory more
comprehensible). I am trying to discover and tell the literal truth about romantic
love to the best of my ability.
Crucially, I don’t subscribe to the idea that we cannot alter the nature of love.
Romantic love, at least, we can change. We are constantly refining and
redefining its social nature. The process is slow and not always perceptible to the
casual observer, but incremental change is always happening. It becomes easier
to see when we reflect on how different, socially, romantic love is now compared
to a hundred years ago.
It’s vital that we become aware of this, because we share a collective
responsibility for how the process goes on. We have a responsibility to make
romantic love a force for good: to make sure our changes to the “script” direct
love toward becoming a better version of itself. Resorting to deterministic
thinking—there’s nothing we can do, no change we can make—is a way of
abdicating our responsibility. It is treating damaging romantic stereotypes as a
force of nature that we can neither control nor change, throwing up our hands
and saying, “Lovers gonna love.” It is an excess of serenity.
Even a biological theorist of love shouldn’t buy this deterministic attitude,
because it’s now becoming clear that it is possible to alter the nature of love at
the biological as well as the social level. In fact, this idea has a venerable history.

Kinds of Magic

Serious interventions into the biology of love are only recently starting to sound
realistic. But the idea of inducing or curing love with potions, lotions, balms,
ointments, or basically anything we can get our hands on is an ancient one. It’s
been pervasive in art, literature, and medicine for thousands of years. While it’s
complicated to assume that anything like the current social role of romantic love
existed in the ancient world, the biology of love certainly did. And people
wanted to control it, even if that meant resorting to magic.3
Perhaps this possibility has such a grip on our collective imagination because
the ability to control someone’s love is a powerful thing. When it comes to plot
construction, at any rate, love magic is a gift that keeps on giving. Think of that
episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which Buffy’s goofy male friend Xander
gets the entire female population of Sunnydale High chasing him around; or
Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amour, in which naive villager Nemorino purchases a
highly priced love potion from a “doctor” of dubious credentials (this particular
love potion—an inexpensive Bordeaux—turns out to be quite effective); or
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which features both a “love” potion
and its antidote.
Love potions stay fresh as plot devices because they tap into a long-standing
fascination with altering the biology of love. That idea isn’t confined to fiction,
though. When treated as a genuine possibility, it becomes even more fascinating:
it reveals a lot about how we understand love, life, and the human condition. If
biological interventions into love are indeed our future, we will be better
prepared to face it if we know something of the relevant past.
For centuries, it was believed that body and mind alike were regulated by
four “humors,” or bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. The
ancient Greek physician Hippocrates—who gave his name to the Hippocratic
oath—formalized this idea, though it probably originated even earlier. Although
modern science has left the four humors theory behind, it still resonates in our
vocabulary: when we describe someone as “melancholy,” for example, we are
attributing to that individual the kind of temperament once thought to result from
an excess of black bile (in Greek, melas + khole) in the body.
As soon as you think physical substances in the body are responsible for
emotions and behavior, biological interventions into love will appear viable. In
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, physicians working with the theory of
the four humors thought that “erotic love” was associated with the blood.4 They
believed that certain foods—white bread, eggs, and potatoes, for example—
could help make one more “sanguine” (from sanguis, the Latin word for blood)
and thus more “amorous.” Being physically cooled down, on the other hand, was
believed to suppress the blood and consequently any amorous tendencies.

In Sickness and in Health

Biological interventions have often focused on eliminating or “curing” love.

Viewing love as something to “cure” requires first medicalizing it, which also
has a long history. The idea of love as a source of severe physical and mental
symptoms appears to go back as far as love itself, and in some eras
“lovesickness” was treated very seriously as a medical condition.
We can contextualize the medicalization of love by considering the ancient
Greek poet Sappho. She lived in the 600s BCE and arguably invented lyric love
poetry—an art form that went on to play a huge role in shaping the composite
image of romantic love. In her most famous poem, Sappho presents us with what
appears to be a visceral description of passionate love and associated jealousy.5
She describes the symptoms in detail: her heart flutters, she feels faint and
feverish, she cannot see or speak, her ears thrum, she’s dripping with sweat, she
has the shakes, she’s turning green—in fact, she’s practically dying. (It turns out
melodrama isn’t a new invention either.)
Shakespeare also presented love as a serious illness. In Sonnet 147, for
example, he uses explicit and protracted medical imagery to convey an
experience of frustrated and despairing love, starting with “My love is as a fever
longing still, / For that which longer nurseth the disease,” before going on to say
that his desire amounts to death, that his reason has left him, that his thoughts
and words are “as madmen’s are,” and that he’s “past cure.” These sorts of
sentiments were already sufficiently clichéd by 1885 for W. S. Gilbert to parody
them in the libretto of The Mikado, in which Ko-Ko describes his “love” for
Katisha as “a white-hot passion that is slowly but surely consuming my very
vitals!”
Interestingly, while Shakespeare’s Sonnet 147 sets out by presenting love as a
physical illness (a “fever”), the metaphor then shifts to what we might now
classify as a mental illness (a “madness”). But since his contemporaries would
have construed both fevers and madness as imbalances in the four bodily
humors, this distinction might have looked less significant to Shakespeare. Be
that as it may, he is not at all subtle in developing the idea that love is a kind of
insanity. His character Rosalind in As You Like It says, “Love is merely a
madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen
do: and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is
so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.” As this passage makes vivid, the
association of love with mental illness can bring with it some really disturbing
ideas about the latter.
Shakespeare wasn’t the first to connect love with madness. In his Phaedrus,
Plato has the character of Socrates describe eros as a form of madness (though
here, as always, we should be wary of assuming that eros is the same thing as
romantic love). Socrates initially dismisses eros as a distraction from the rational
life. But he later apologizes for this, saying that eros can actually be a beneficial
form of madness. He notes, though, that his opinions on this point “will not be
believed by the merely clever, but will be accepted by the truly wise.”6
In this statement-plus-retraction, and perhaps especially in this distinguishing
of the “clever” from the “wise,” Plato foreshadows the complex dance between
love and rationality that has threaded throughout the subsequent history of
thinking about love. It threads through this book too, in those early worries about
“overthinking it,” in Bertrand Russell’s careful choice of words when advising
future generations that “love is wise,” and in the different ways love embeds
itself in Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of human nature. When
presented as “madness,” love is opposed to rationality—but maybe not to
wisdom.
In any case, at your next dinner party you can challenge your friends to
identify the one philosophical idea that unites the work of Plato, Shakespeare,
Queen, and Beyoncé (the last two being responsible for the songs “Crazy Little
Thing Called Love” and “Crazy in Love,” respectively). The idea of love as
madness is still very much with us, and throughout the ages it has served as one
of the principal entry points for the medicalization of love.

Love Cures

Twentieth-century English professor Lawrence Babb, writing about the

medicalization of love in its Renaissance incarnation, says, “In medical works,
love is discussed as a brainsickness and is placed in company with madness,
melancholy, hydrophobia, [and] frenzy.”7 He draws our attention to some
passages in Renaissance works that explicitly medicalize love, including one
from a sixteenth-century medical text by French physician André du Laurens.
While agreeing with Robert Burton, author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, that
“the last and best Cure of Love-Melancholy, is to let [the sufferers] have their
Desire,” du Laurens adds, “This course of cure being such, as neither ought nor
can alwaies be put in practise, as being contrary vnto the lawes of God and men,
we must haue recourse vnto … the industrie of the good Physition.”8
The medical industry has always enthusiastically stepped up to the plate. In
du Laurens’s era, bloodletting was one proposed cure. Admittedly, this was
medicine’s proposed solution for pretty much everything at the time, but using it
to cure love could make some kind of sense if you thought “amorousness” was
due to a preponderance of blood unbalancing the four humors. Eating less food
and keeping oneself busy were also recommended as cures for love-melancholy.
Babb reports that physicians of the Renaissance generally thought of love
maladies as “a matter for grave concern.” They proposed a mix of what we
might now call therapeutic and biological interventions: “The former include
mainly stratagems to divert the lover’s mind from the beloved or to turn love
into hatred or disgust; the latter, which may be used either as remedies or as
preventives, include phlebotomy [i.e., bloodletting], drugs, exercise, and dietary
schemes.”
Just like direct biological interventions, therapeutic or behavioral
interventions to “cure” love are both ancient and still with us. Ovid’s poem
“Remedia Amoris”—literally, “The Cure for Love”—is the Roman equivalent of
an advice column for young men trying to get over women who are not
interested in them. Don’t bother with herbs or witchcraft, says Ovid. Try filling
your time with law, warfare, hunting, and travel. “Love yields to business: be
busy, and you will be safe.”9 He offers some dietary advice too, including an
injunction to avoid onions—all kinds of onions, no matter where they come
from, “be they Daunian or sent from Libyan shores or come they from Megara.”
To understand the significance of all these ideas for “curing” love, we must
identify the motivations, ideologies, and assumptions behind them. Ovid gives
us valuable clues about what his contemporaries were thinking in trying to
“cure” love. These ideas are still playing out in our own time: some of Ovid’s
advice wouldn’t be out of place on the website of a contemporary “men’s rights
activist” or “pickup artist.” For example, he urges men to “turn to the worse”
anything that is attractive about a woman. And he offers examples of how to do
this: “Call her fat, if she is full-breasted, black, if dark-complexioned; in a
slender woman leanness can be made a reproach. If she is not simple, she can be
called pert: if she is honest, she can be called simple.” Ovid also recommends
making women embarrass themselves by doing things they aren’t good at:
“Insist that she sing, if she be without a voice; make her dance, if she know not
how to move her arms.” And he suggests showing up early in the morning
before she’s had time to get dressed properly so that the “hapless woman” can be
let down “by her own defects.”
Ovid may or may not have been attempting irony or parody. (Like Friedrich
Nietzsche, he’s sometimes given this kind of excuse.) Either way, the fact that he
was writing thousands of years ago shines a light on how deeply unoriginal these
attitudes to love and gender are. Even then, it made sense to think of love as a
gendered war zone where the winner is the one who manages to feel and care the
least. Of course, if that’s what you think love is, then finding a “cure” will strike
you as a winning strategy. I would suggest, though, that this is in fact an
indication that something has gone wrong with your conception of love—and
your worldview.

Disability and Addiction

Associating love with mental illness is one entry point for medicalizing love.
There are at least two others: associating love with disability and with addiction.
Let’s consider disability first. Perhaps the most common association under
this heading is the idea that “love is blind.” This is an instance of a broader
pattern of metaphorical uses of blindness to capture a lack of awareness. This
isn’t always supposed to be a negative; justice is often depicted as blind to
suggest unawareness of irrelevant distractions that could introduce bias. But
“Love is blind” has the rather different connotation that when you are in love
you are ignorant of—or “unable to see”—things like serious faults in your lover
or the reasons why the relationship can never work out. As such, this application
of the blindness metaphor trades on a harmful and inaccurate stereotype of blind
people as ignorant or lacking awareness concerning important matters and
making bad decisions (“stumbling into things”) as a result.
We can salvage from the metaphor, without importing its discriminatory
baggage, the idea that love often involves a lack of awareness. This can facilitate
love’s function: forming a nuclear bond is easier when you aren’t noticing all of
your lover’s flaws. But it comes with the familiar problematic consequences,
such as the misery and abuse that can result from committing (emotionally,
financially, and so on) without adequate awareness of who your partner really is.
Like its associations with blindness and mental illness, love’s association
with addiction is so well established as to be a cliché. Robert Palmer famously
rocked out about love addiction in his 1980s hit “Addicted to Love,” listing its
various symptoms in a manner reminiscent of Sappho’s 2,500-year-old poem.
But we are now learning that there are real physical and neurochemical
similarities between some kinds of love and some kinds of chemical addiction.
In a collaborative 2010 paper, neuroscientist Lucy Brown highlights some of
these similarities.10 She reports her research (undertaken with others, including
Helen Fisher) on the brains of young adults recently rejected in love, “arguably
the group showing the greatest ‘addiction’ to another person.” These studies
found that in such subjects the ventral tegmental area (part of the brain’s “reward
system” associated with dopamine production and distribution) showed greater
activation, a phenomenon also often seen in the early stages of romantic love.
This suggests that “the sight of the sweetheart is still rewarding” after rejection.
However, more disturbingly, the recently rejected subjects also displayed
patterns of heightened activity in certain regions of the brain previously found to
correlate with craving in cocaine addicts.
We’ve come a long way from the idea that love-melancholy stems from an
excess of blood, but in many ways we are still engaged in the same project.
Drawing on advances in neuroscience, ethicists are beginning to discuss the real
possibility of bringing love within the scope of modern drug treatments. The
association with addiction is particularly foregrounded here, the idea being that it
may be possible to “cure” love using methods already used to treat addiction
and/or to develop new treatments based on love’s similarities with addiction. For
example, ethicists have suggested that “just as heroin addicts are sometimes
given oral naltrexone to block the pharmacological effects of their drug, we
could use oxytocin antagonists to reduce the reward an individual receives from
being close to another person.”11
 Real Drugs … Real Love?

Maybe we are about to hit the moment when “curing love” with drugs is no
longer just fiction or quackery. It might, however, still be grounded in confusion.
Is it really love we are trying to cure?
I can see why we might want to cure things like infatuation, obsession,
stalking, or intimate partner abuse. But these aren’t love. In fact, calling them
that is dangerous. The word “love” is powerful and typically interpreted as very
positive. Deploying that word can effectively conceal what is actually a terrible
situation. The violence of an abusive partner, for example, is not the result of
“too much love.” But abusers call it that to gain sympathy and keep themselves
in a position to cause further harm.
It is perhaps more controversial whether the kind of attachment that makes it
hard for an abused partner to leave a toxic relationship is a kind of “love” that
needs to be “cured.” But in many such cases, the experience may not be one of
genuine love at all: it could indicate an unhealthy dependence, a fear of leaving,
or a suite of other things. Even if love is present, it’s not clear that the love itself
needs curing (as opposed to the effects of trauma, a lack of personal safety or
autonomy as a result of the abuser’s actions, and so on).
The best way to approach the problems created by obsession and abuse is not
to talk about “curing love” but to draw a clear distinction between love and the
things that are causing harm and need to be “cured.” bell hooks’s work on love
has inspired this strategy, which is, to my mind, the only one that will enable us
to tackle the real problems with sufficient clarity. Talk of “curing love” only
serves to muddy the waters—the last thing we need in such difficult situations.
We should also bear in mind that we have a history of attempting to “cure”
certain forms of love and that history hardly inspires confidence. The devastating
effects of attempts to “cure” queer people’s romantic feelings and orientations
using “chemical castration” and “conversion therapy” are well-known. Our track
record is not a shining example of humanity’s ability to wield medical
technologies with competence and compassion.
What about the idea of using drugs to induce or sustain love? This may sound
less alarming, on the face of it, than “curing” love. But again, we will do well to
take a careful look at the motivations before we sign up too enthusiastically. A
recent argument for chemically induced love claimed that “marriage is good for
children especially if it is happy,” the idea being that using drugs to keep married
couples in love, and hence together, would be beneficial.12 But are we to assume
that a particular subset of marriages—the ones that would have broken up if not
for chemical intervention—are also “good for children”? I don’t know what
evidence we could have for such a claim, but in the absence of evidence, it is
suspicious.
Even more revealingly, the authors of this argument also offer another, which
they say is based on justice. They write, “Currently, the natural lottery creates
inequality. Some men are successful and some women are attractive, having the
widest choice of mates. Others are less desirable. Chemically inducing lust and
attractiveness might give those lower on the tree of life a chance to climb higher.
This could create a more level playing field.”
By now, you should be well placed to identify some familiar ideology at
work here. For example, there are standard gender stereotypes: notice the
assumption, without comment, that the widest choice of mates goes to the
attractive women and the successful men. Most important, though, is the
suggestion that we view the ethics of love and sex through the lens of equitable
distribution, or justice. We need to remember that we are talking about people
and their most intimate relationships with other people. Is the idea that the
unattractive women will voluntarily choose to take drugs in order to become
available to the unsuccessful men (and vice versa)? Or will they be forced to
take such drugs? The first option sounds bizarre, but the second is disturbing.
Anyhow, who decides who counts as unattractive or unsuccessful in the first
place? In such subjective assessments, whose standards are we to take as
definitive?
Let’s drill down a bit deeper to see what’s gone wrong. We’ve already come
across the big picture idea at work behind the scenes in the “justice” argument:
the notion that romantic partners are a kind of resource akin to wealth or private
property. This idea is manifest here in the use of language like “competition” and
“lottery” to describe what is in reality a search for intimacy and loving
connection, as well as in the presentation of free romantic choice as a source of
inequality that we should rectify with redistributive measures.
The idea of partners as resources or property is a cultural hangover: a
remnant of monogamy’s origins in the possession and control of women as a
route to assured paternity and the inheritance of a man’s wealth by his biological
children. This model viewed women as something akin to livestock or brood
mares. Extending this horrifying attitude to romantic partners in general is not
progress; I have no patience with the equation of people with property. That
idea’s time has well and truly passed (and should never have arrived). As a
philosopher and a human, I am drawn to what the future of romantic love might
look like if we could just stop thinking about other people—including our
romantic partners—as property or prizes, as things we can win or possess, or as
things it makes sense to redistribute in the name of “justice.”
I believe we can eradicate that mind-set. But it will take a shift in attitudes—
a big one—and we can’t achieve this by medicating people.
Then again, such a shift isn’t going to happen anytime soon, and individuals
are suffering right now because of love—or at least because of experiences
they’re calling “love.” If we can help them with drugs, we should, right? The
short answer is, of course, yes. We should help people if we can. But the long
answer is that, as with any medical intervention, we must approach this
possibility with an eye to the grave risks of papering over symptoms while the
real issues go unaddressed. And we should be extremely careful about how we
describe what we’re doing. We should hear alarm bells when intervening
medically in an abusive relationship gets described as “curing love.”
Nor should we get carried away with the idea that we really can cure any or
all problematic symptoms with drugs. The relevant neuroscience is still in its
infancy. We have advanced considerably beyond the theory of the four humors,
but it’s still a good bet that any drug interventions we propose today will, in a
few hundred years, sound about as helpful as opening a vein to make someone
less sanguine or as effective as Ovid’s ban on onions.
One of the safest predictions you can make about our future is that it will
resemble our past and present. It takes highly sophisticated weather-forecasting
technology to outperform the algorithm that says tomorrow will be like today.
But as we improve our understanding of the biology of love, keeping love’s dual
nature in mind just might help us avoid repeating past patterns of medicalizing
and individualizing issues that are truly neither medical nor individual. We need
to be aware that love’s biology—and, more generally, love at the level of the
individual—is only part of the picture. It’s not the only place, or even the most
obvious place, to seek a diagnosis when things go wrong. If something is
seriously wrong with the social role of romantic love, drugs will not fix it—
even, or perhaps especially, if they work.
Despite what the romantic mystique would have us believe, we can change
the nature of love. We can certainly rewrite the social script. We may also be
able to retrain the biological actor. And this means we have some serious
thinking to do about which of these options we want to pursue, and how, and,
crucially, why. As we move into a period of increased understanding of the
biology of love, the attendant ethical risks and responsibilities will only keep
growing. We will need to think harder about this than we’ve ever had to before.

The One Weird Trick for a Fabulous Love Life

As much as our understanding of the science of love is improving, it is important

to approach all the sensationalizing headlines about it with one eyebrow pre-
raised. “Scientists can now tell if you’re in love by scanning your brain,” ran one
recent headline on the website Science Alert, “and they know if you’re faking
it.”13 They know? Oh, you’re so busted.
Except, of course, you’re not. Headlines in this style are like the images on
the outside of a microwave meal or the title I chose for this section: if you base
your expectations on such unrealistic promises, you will be disappointed. Here’s
what the scientists who did the work behind that headline actually said: “The
results shed light on the underlying neural mechanisms of romantic love, and
demonstrate the possibility of applying a resting-state fMRI approach for
investigating romantic love.”14 They found some statistical correlations, among
a group of college students, between brain scan results and being “currently
intensely in love” (as measured by a rather problematic questionnaire designed
in the 1980s).15 This is quite a limited finding and certainly does not mean they
can “tell” who is or isn’t in love just by scanning brains. They cannot prove
you’re “faking it,” and they are not coming after you to take away your love
credentials.
Staying alert to what we are really learning also means remembering that
every conversation about love—be it scientific, medical, or anything else—
comes with masses of baggage in the form of preconfigured social attitudes and
expectations. Neglecting this leaves everyone vulnerable—particularly groups
excluded or harmed by the current social script for romantic love and those
experiencing abuse in love’s name. But it’s risky for anyone to make major life
decisions based on love without understanding what love is and where our
assumptions about it really come from.
 We are similarly vulnerable in deciding whether to pursue options for
medical intervention. To make these choices in a responsible way, a good first
step is to see romantic love as in a state of continual interplay between the
biological and the social. Whatever else the future holds, as long as we retain our
own dual natures as biological and social beings, love will have a foot in both
camps as well. No pill will cure the problems we have built into love’s social
role, but we may be able to manipulate the biology of love more wisely once we
appreciate this.
As the Serenity Prayer suggests, we need courage to change the things we
can and serenity to accept the things we cannot. But when it comes to the future
of love, we most urgently need wisdom—not just to know what we can and
cannot change, but to know what kind of creature we are dealing with in the first
place, to locate the hidden seams between love’s biological machinery and its
ideological contours, and to see clearly the motivations behind proposed
interventions. Acquiescence in the romantic mystique—the idea that we can’t
change anything about love and thus don’t have to try—represents a dearth of
courage and an excess of serenity. But overenthusiasm about the medical
manipulation of love is not exactly the inverse (an excess of courage and a
dearth of serenity). Rather, it is symptomatic of a deep lack of wisdom: a
misconstrual of the nature of the beast.
 Coda:
Make It So

They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we
are, but know not what we may be.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Love’s Politics

Say anything about changing or challenging romantic love, and some people are
going to hear you as advocating for a world where love has been eliminated and
replaced by constant, guilt-free sex. That’s a weird leap of logic when you think
about it. Where does it come from?
One piece of the puzzle is that sex and love have been assimilated into a
political divide and set in opposition. Roughly speaking, advocating for sex is
viewed as progressive or liberal, while advocating for love is viewed as
traditionalist or conservative. This manifests in many ways—for example, when
people try to make a relationship sound less respectable by saying it’s “just sex”
or, conversely, make it sound more respectable by saying it’s “true love.” The
crucial fixed point in these discussions is that love itself is respectable, reliable,
sensible, dependable, and lots of other things that conservatives like.
Two mistakes are happening here. First, love and sex are not in any kind of
opposition. They are not the same thing, but they’re not competitors either.1
Second, love is far too powerful to cede to any one political ideology. In reality,
there is nothing conservative about love per se: it has been a site of radical social
change, just as it has been a site of stability and tradition. Love wasn’t busy
being respectable in the 1960s; it was wild and free.
Changing the social role of romantic love is never easy, but love’s
politicization as a force for conservatism makes it all the more challenging.
While I can’t predict the future any more than you can, we can probably all take
a lesson from weather forecasting: by and large, tomorrow will be like today.
Any change will happen incrementally and against a background of continuity. I
do, however, have a guess as to which incremental change is coming next. One
norm structuring love’s social role has been gradually coming under more and
more pressure, to the point where it has become obviously unsustainable. I think
the next change will have to be one that relieves this pressure.
The problematic norm is that everyone should have one true love forever,
with the important corollaries that (1) this entails sexual monogamy forever, and
(2) it should be enforced for men as well as for women. It’s not hard to see that a
huge head of steam has built up behind that idea. High and rising divorce rates
suggest that the one-true-love-forever model is not sustainable as a universal
norm. And the idea that one will eventually and inevitably lose sexual and/or
romantic interest in one’s long-term partner has become so normalized as to be a
rom com trope in its own right. Relationship therapist Esther Perel puts it this
way: “Everywhere romanticism has entered, there seems to be a crisis of
desire.”2 Yet, at the moment, we seem to be attempting to treat this problem at
the individual level: with medical interventions like Viagra, with couples
therapy, and with forlorn purchases of exciting lingerie.
We can go back to philosopher Bertrand Russell for some perspective on all
this. Russell thought that society had shut down women’s sexuality as a way of
controlling paternity: it assured men that wives would not desire any other man
but would still be duty-bound to submit sexually to their spouses. However, this
strategy doesn’t work once women are socially and legally empowered to refuse
sex within marriage. Marital rape was still legal in some parts of the United
States until 1993 and in England until 1991, and change in practice arrives at an
even more glacial pace than change in principle. When you think about it, then,
we are only just tumbling to the consequences of the old strategy’s expiration.
We are now scrambling for a new one.
It is no coincidence that we are just now seeing a new drug, Flibanserin,
marketed as a treatment for “female sexual dysfunction,” approved for use in the
United States. Originally developed as an antidepressant, the drug wasn’t found
sufficiently effective. Its effectiveness for increasing female sexual desire is also
quite limited, and there are potentially serious side effects. (Flibanserin was
rejected for FDA approval twice before being accepted.) But desperate times call
for desperate measures. And the universal one-true-love-forever model has so far
outstayed its welcome that we are, as a society, getting pretty desperate.

Tomorrow Could Be Like Yesterday

Even if medical interventions can help some people, they are not enough to
suppress a problem on this scale. They are a patch: an attempt to paper over the
symptoms of a social problem by “treating” individuals. The attitudes behind
Flibanserin are reminiscent of the mass deployment of tranquilizers in the 1960s
to quell women’s dissatisfaction with the romantic gender role of housewife, a
phenomenon immortalized in the Rolling Stones song “Mother’s Little Helper.”
As we continue to live longer, demand personal satisfaction from romantic
relationships, and—crucially—exercise the right to refuse sex even if we are
married and female, the pressure on the one-true-love-forever model continues
to intensify.
Once we identify romantic love as a dual-natured phenomenon, we have a
powerful way of understanding what is happening and what our options are. We
can diagnose a case of unsustainably poor casting: a large-scale mismatch
between the ancient biological machinery of love (the actor from my earlier
analogy) and the modern social role that it is now expected to play. The social
script still prescribes a one-true-love-forever model but now with two added
features: greater sexual autonomy for women and enforced sexual monogamy
for men. And the biological actor in many of us is simply a terrible casting
choice for this role. I don’t doubt that for some people it is a good fit, but there
are just far too many for whom it is not.
This wouldn’t be the first time such poor casting has eventually become
unsustainable. The exclusion of same-sex relationships from the social role of
romantic love couldn’t, and didn’t, switch off queer people’s neurochemical love
responses to same-sex partners. Attempts to retrain the biological actor by
“treating” queer individuals have failed spectacularly. The solution was to
rewrite the script for romantic love at the social level. Thankfully, this approach
is now winning out in the part of the world where I live.
In the same way, society’s insistence on the one-true-love-forever model
can’t, and won’t, shut down the neurochemistry of all the people who fall in love
with a new person after promising themselves to an existing partner or of all the
people who grow bored of long-term monogamous romance with their spouses.
We can keep trying to retrain the biological actor by diagnosing these individuals
with a medical problem and attempting to “cure” their desire for others or their
chronic boredom. Or we can reconsider the failing social norm.
Recent work by ethicists Brian Earp, Anders Sandberg, and Julian Savulescu
has identified options approximately resembling these two.3 Like many others in
this business, they lean toward efforts to prop up lifelong monogamy with
biological interventions. They say, “We know that adultery causes harm,” and so
does divorce. Their list of what “we know” continues: “The emotional harm
associated with adultery is built in through jealousy … designed to keep parental
resources focused on existing offspring. Jealousy, then, as opposed to adultery, is
consistent with values aimed at keeping families intact.” As Bertrand Russell
noted in Marriage and Morals, “Jealousy has the sanction of moralists.” This is
as true now as it was in the 1920s. Notice, too, how terms like “built in” and
“designed” are used to hint that a kind of biological determinism underwrites the
envisaged family values.
Earp and his coauthors further argue that “a hands off adultery norm might
also raise concerns about equity, since men are much more likely than women to
desire extramarital sex.… Finally, convincing 97% of the population to reverse a
cornerstone social value seems unlikely, to say the least.” They think all this is
grounds to conclude that “the norm against adultery is probably worth retaining
on a broad scale—however ‘unnatural’ absolute sexual fidelity may in fact be.”
All those claims about what “we know” might resonate with the authors’ own
experiences, but your mileage may vary. Mine has. In fact, the argument has
many problems, several of which we’ve already addressed in other contexts. For
example, this trope of appealing to equity is probably starting to sound familiar
by now. In this incarnation, it’s phrased as a concern that if nonmonogamy is
tolerated, it will be harder for men than for women to get as much extramarital
sex as they want, and that wouldn’t be fair to men. (We are left to wonder how
equitable the current arrangement is for women.) The underlying assumption is
that relationships are the sort of thing where it makes sense to think in terms of
equitable distribution. But, on pain of sounding like a broken record, they aren’t.
Love, sex, and people are not property or resources that we get to manage and
distribute in the name of “equity.” Men are not entitled to demand a “fair share”
of love, sex, or women.
We can also think back to earlier discussions of how contemporary empirical
research is raising doubts about the gender stereotype—assumed without
comment in the above argument—that women want monogamy and don’t want
sex except with their spouses. And we might recall Russell’s suggestion that it is
preferable to rein in jealousy rather than love.
But there is a new point to make here as well, and it concerns one of the most
alarming assumptions in the argument: the idea that, if we are unlikely to
convince 97 percent of the population to reverse a cornerstone social value, that
means the norm is probably worth retaining. Russell is once more a source of
inspiration when facing an argument like this. As he said, “The fact that an
opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly
absurd.”
Let’s not forget that as recently as 1958, another cornerstone social value
prohibited interracial love in the United States. At that time, 94 percent of
Americans disapproved of “marriages between white and coloured people.”4 We
could have reasoned that it was unlikely, to say the least, that we could change
this. We could have wielded that as a reason to conclude that the norms against
interracial relationships were probably worth retaining.
I’m glad we didn’t.

’Til Expiration Dates Do Us Part

Over the last century, the contours of love’s social profile have changed quite a
lot. Romantic love is no longer strictly limited to opposite-sex love or to love
between two people of the same race. As the one-true-love-forever model now
fails us, will we soon remove the monogamy and permanence restrictions as
well?
My bet is no. We are not going to remove both these features from the
composite image of romantic love anytime soon. That’s too big a change to
accomplish all at once. Instead, I wager that one of these features is about to
give, as a sort of safety valve that will permit the preservation of the other, at
least for a time. I actually predict that the “forever” part will give way first.
Many people around me are already comfortable with the idea of serial
temporary monogamy. While you’re still not exactly supposed to plan for it, de
facto serial temporary monogamy is no longer scandalous or even surprising.
Given this starting point, chosen—and eventually de jure—temporary
monogamy looks like a relative shoo-in. Over the protests of traditionalists,5
many marrying couples are already choosing to replace “till death us do part”
with alternatives like “as long as love lasts” or are simply omitting to mention
the issue of duration altogether in their vows. Many are making prenuptial
agreements to determine what will happen if and when the marriage ends.
Philosopher Daniel Nolan has recently advocated for legal temporary
marriage on grounds of fairness.6 He argues that straightforward considerations
of marriage equality should extend to those who want a temporary marriage. He
also points out that some religious and cultural traditions include temporary
marriage forms, which means that a legal system that fails to accommodate them
privileges certain religious and cultural traditions over others.
The introduction of temporary monogamous marriage would relieve the
pressure behind the one-true-love-forever model while allowing for broad
continuity with the current status quo. And gradual change against a backdrop of
continuity is how these things work. Romantic gender stereotypes, monogamy,
nuclear privilege, and so on, can all be preserved in a social structure where
some marriages have a prearranged end date. We could even preserve stability
with regard to raising children if we treated their arrival as automatically
transforming a marriage from a temporary one into a permanent one (as Bertrand
Russell suggested back in 1929), or at least into one that lasts until the children
reach adulthood. Perhaps most significantly, from an ideological standpoint, we
can retain the deep implicit connections between romantic love and private
property: we need only reconceptualize marriage as renting rather than
purchasing.
In all these ways, temporary monogamy, while it might sound a little
unromantic at the moment, poses far less of a threat to the social role of romantic
love than polyamory does. Polyamory directly challenges two often invisible
(but ideologically precious) ideas: paternity control through the sexual restriction
of women and the conception of a romantic partner as one’s private property. It
strikes at the heart of the historical purpose of romantic love (and also, in my
opinion, at the heart of what is wrong with it today). Perhaps not unrelatedly,
while both polyamory and temporary marriage are anathema to religious and
social conservatives, only polyamory currently induces disgust responses from
across the entire spectrum of political orientation. These days, if you have two
temporary relationships sequentially, you are normal. If you have two permanent
relationships simultaneously, you are “a degenerate herpes-infested whore.”7
While I hope that polyamory can gradually become less illegal in places like
the United States—where legislatures could take outmoded adultery laws off the
books without any tangible effect—and that those in nonmonogamous
relationships can move toward some minimal formal protection from
discrimination, I predict that polyamory will continue to be punishable by death
in many parts of the world and that people like me will continue to be regarded
as disgusting and sinful by many of our neighbors for the foreseeable future.

Are We Unstoppable?

I believe we can, collectively, effect unimaginable changes to romantic love’s

social role. But just how far could these changes be taken? How much can we
mess about with romantic love before we have destroyed it?
Let’s tackle this possibility head-on. What if we did destroy romantic love?
Does it matter? Maybe we should replace romantic love with other kinds of love,
free from the unfortunate baggage. Romantic love has always been intimately
connected with the idea that people—especially women—are a kind of private
property. It has been a powerful tool in the enforcement of class structures, racist
segregation, and homophobic oppression. Are we sure we want to keep it
around?
While this is an intriguing question, it’s moot as far as planning goes. I don’t
think it is feasible to abolish romantic love, at least not until we live in the kind
of science fiction future where we can replace or reprogram our meat brains. We
could try to tear up the social script for romantic love: to stop organizing our
social lives around it, stop talking about it as if it were a desirable thing, and
perhaps even stop talking about it as if it were a thing at all. But I think it’s
pretty clear that the results of such an attempt would be suppression, secrecy,
suffering, and/or constant medical intervention to maintain the brave new status
quo. If we tore up love’s social script, the ancient biological machinery of love
would persist, and it would insist. In fact it’s hard to see this future as anything
but a science fiction dystopia.8
Another possible future sees us destroying romantic love at the social level in
a very different way. Instead of forbidding or suppressing it, we just keep
broadening the social role of love until it no longer imposes any substantive
constraints. By that point, romantic love is no longer a distinctive thing, because
pretty much any and every kind of vaguely positive feeling toward something or
someone else counts as romantic love. Is that a viable future? Could we
gradually replace all of love’s traditional characterizing features—monogamy,
permanence, heteroromanticism, romantic gender roles, and so on—over time?
Would there still be romantic love at the end of that process?
While this is probably more feasible than suppression, in practice I suspect
the question is again ultimately moot. Romantic love is not going to undergo a
total replacement of all of its characteristic features. It’s true that many recent
changes to the social role of love have tended toward making love less
restrictive, but the biological machinery of love will continue to serve as an
anchor for the kind of social script writing that has any realistic chance of
working out. Unless we get a lot better at neuroscience, love is going to retain its
recognizable biological symptoms. Racing hearts and the feeling of dopamine
reward will be a part of the picture, as long as there are hearts and dopamine. As
long as there is oxytocin, there will be cases of the warm fuzzies. Any social
script for love that gave us no way to make coherent sense of these experiences
would just land us with another case of unsustainably poor casting.
I think we are capable of striking the necessary balance: changing what needs
to change without destroying romantic love entirely. Here’s how. Romantic love,
at the social level, could have the function of taking as input attraction and
affection between adults (not necessarily a particular number or of particular
genders) and outputting intimate bonds and relationships that are special and
significant in people’s lives. Optional add-ons can then include sex, kids, home
building, family building, agreeing not to enter into other relationships, caring
for a dog together, writing love poems … whatever floats the boat of the people
in the boat. These optional extras would work like a buffet: people would be free
to decide on the features they wanted in their own relationships without facing
stigma for what they did or didn’t choose. And they would be free to switch it up
over time, going back to the buffet to add something new to their plates or
remove something they didn’t like. We would ditch the idea of a “standard
model” for how romantic love should look.
Might it then become impossible to distinguish romantic love from other
kinds of love, such as the love in an intense friendship? I don’t see that this
would be a common problem; often a selection of the optional extras would be
present, helping to determine that the love involved is romantic. But in an ideal
world—where we have ceased privileging romantic love as the norm for
everybody—who cares? If it’s a close call whether a relationship is romantic or
platonic, the people in the relationship could just call it how they want it. Why
not?

Choose Your Own Adventure

When asked what messages he would send to future generations, Bertrand

Russell picked two. One we’ve already encountered: “Love is wise, hatred is
foolish.” The other was this: “When you are studying any matter, or considering
any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the
facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe
or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed.”
I wish I could believe that polyamorous relationships like mine will soon be
widely socially acknowledged as genuine and normal cases of romantic love.
But I don’t. I also think that a general belief that romantic love has no biology
and is a pure social construct would have beneficent social effects—at least in
the short term. This would help us feel more empowered to make changes to
love’s social role without feeling constrained by (what we take to be) our
biology. But the truth is that love has a biological nature too, and in the long run
we ignore this at our peril.
Yet the truth of love’s dual nature is empowering in its own right. It
empowers us to seek out genuinely possible changes to love’s social role,
without neglecting or dismissing the fact that we have the biology we do. It
means we can respect love’s biological nature without simply regarding
ourselves as love-driven automata at the mercy of our brain chemistry or
evolutionary history. We can talk about what it means for love’s biology and its
social role to be mismatched and how we might address those mismatches
responsibly. The dual-nature theory also shows why the humanities, the social
sciences, and the natural sciences will all play crucial roles in coming to a full
understanding of what love is and how these enterprises can collaborate rather
than compete for ownership of love as a subject matter.
On a personal level, understanding love’s dual nature can contextualize our
own experiences with love. We come to see our individual stories as embedded
within social structures that we didn’t choose, any more than we chose the
biology that drives us. The dual-nature theory reveals how romantic love points
both within and beyond the privacy of our own heads, hearts, homes, and
relationships. In so doing it empowers those of us who don’t conform to the
“script” to resist the message that we are doing it wrong: we can turn the tables
and question the script itself. And, crucially, it shows us how to do this without
being antiscience or denying that the biology of love is real and important. This
makes our challenges harder to write off.
The script is an off-the-peg deal: sex, passion, affection, care, commitment,
settling down, marriage, earning less or more than your spouse, doing more or
less of the housework, having kids, getting bored with sex, monogamy forever,
then death. And it comes with a side order of amatonormativity, designed to
make it an offer you can’t refuse: it’s this or a life of loneliness (according to US
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy).
We can collectively change this script, alter the emergent contours in our
composite image of love. That takes time, of course. But at an individual level
we can start customizing right now: start designing for ourselves instead of
accepting the off-the-peg model for love (and life). We can custom-build any
new relationship from the ground up, philosophically and reflectively. And we
can approach any existing relationship the same way, because it is an ongoing
project: like a living thing, it grows and changes. In fact, every life is like that,
whether it includes romantic relationships or not. It doesn’t matter whether, in
the past, you’ve followed the script without even noticing. You deserve to
choose your own adventure now.
That said, defying the script can be hard, and the costs of doing so fall on the
“rebels.” Not everyone is in a position to absorb those costs, which makes it all
the more important for those of us who can to speak up and be heard. When we
challenge assumptions and openly customize our relationships, the benefits
accrue to everybody, rebel or not. We all gain a conceptual space in which to
step back and ask ourselves which—if any—aspects of the preexisting script for
love we want to mix and match into our own lives. Even those who like a
traditional flavor of relationship get to choose it rather than having it handed to
them, and this exercise of conscious choice makes such relationships more
comfortable, stable, healthy, and admirable.
Nonconformity can change the world. I mean this literally: if we start
customizing, the composite image of love will change. Love’s new contours will
emerge, and they might surprise us. In this book I’ve made some predictions for
the future; it’s been fun guessing what’s going to happen, and it’ll be fun waiting
around to be proven wrong. But I hope it’s obvious that my guesswork doesn’t
matter. What matters is what we create. Whatever happens, we will make it so.
You are part of that. So if I had to whittle this book down to one message, it
would be a simple one: think about love for yourself. Do not buy it when people
tell you to stop “overthinking” love. It is not an exaggeration to say that love can
matter as much as life itself: for love, some people will give up their homes,
their families, their jobs, their aspirations, and everything else—even their lives.
And yet so much is going on behind the scenes that affects us all. We need to
uncover that hidden machinery and not turn away when it gets ugly, which it
sometimes does. Once we do, we’ll discover that—in all sorts of ways—we
ourselves are the “man behind the curtain.” We’re the ones running this show.
Our decisions about love’s social script and the biological interventions we
might one day develop shape what love is and what it could be.
These are not decisions to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but
reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly. Or, at the very least, with some minimal
awareness of what a huge thing we are doing. Romantic love cannot continue to
be something we just stumble into and accept. That goes for the love in
individual lives, but it goes equally for the bigger picture: the collective script
we are writing together. We deserve to know what our options really are. It’s
time we got to choose our own adventures.
What do you want from yours?
 Acknowledgments

I am lucky to have an amazing support system around me. That is what makes
things like this book possible.
Thanks to my research assistants Jasper Heaton and Aida Roige, to my
directed-study student Jelena Markovic, and to the students in the philosophy
majors’ seminar on the metaphysics of romantic love at the University of British
Columbia during the 2014–2015 academic year, who helped me think about
these topics.
Thanks to the Hampton Fund at the University of British Columbia and the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their financial
support of my research on the nature of love.
Thanks to early readers Liam Kofi Bright, Richard Heck, Daniel Nolan,
Kathryn Pogin, and Audrey Yap for valuable comments and feedback on drafts.
Especial thanks to Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa for reading and commenting on
the whole thing and to Ray Hsu for help with manuscript editing and for sharing
his writerly expertise with a newbie.
Thanks to all the philosophers who didn’t tell me I was doing it wrong for
working on this book and to all the philosophers working to challenge
philosophy’s narrow self-conception and make space for something greater.
Thanks to Marina Adshade and Mandy Len Catron, fellow members of the
Vancouver Love Triangle, for conversations and camaraderie.
Thanks to Quynh Do and T. J. Kelleher at Basic Books and Martha Webb at
the McDermid Agency for their support and guidance through the process of
writing and publishing.
Thanks to Matchstick on Fraser for the coffee and ambience that fueled the
creation of most of the initial manuscript.
Thanks to my inspiring and wonderful family and friends. Especial thanks to
my dog, Mezzo, who provided emotional support, made sure I went outside
every day, and listened patiently to my ideas even though she herself has never
been particularly interested in the philosophy of romantic love.
Above all, thanks to my lovers, past and present, without whom I personally
would not have the first clue about any of this stuff. Or indeed most other things.
 Praise for
WHAT LOVE IS

“Anyone feeling disenchanted or discomforted by the itchy constraints of

traditional, heteronormative, monogamous, pair-bonded, procreative, romantic
love will be well-served to read Jenkins’ accessible and incisive treatise on what
love is. Within her argumentation is a well-placed critique of the misogyny and
heterosexism woven throughout traditional philosophical and scientific discourse
on love. Through a feminist lens, she studies these biases and reveals their links
to contemporary beliefs about love and relationships, highlighting how these
constructs ultimately constrain expressions of affection from the many possible
configurations that, for some, may be more satisfying than the monolithic norm
of monogamous, heterosexual love. Hers is a readable, entertaining, and
poignant commentary on the current state of thinking, sure to ignite passionate
conversation while working to dissolve the artificial boundaries limiting our
experience of love.”

—Meredith L. Chivers, Associate Professor of Psychology, Queen’s University

 Notes

Notes to Prologue
1. One example can be found in philosopher Alan Soble’s article “The Unity
of Romantic Love,” Philosophy and Theology 1, no. 4 (1987): 374–397. For
more about how and why philosophers build monogamy assumptions into their
theories of love, see Carrie Jenkins, “Modal Monogamy,” Ergo 2, no. 8 (2015):
175–194.
2. Savage talked about this change of heart in 2014: Dan Savage, “SL Letter
of the Day: Happy Anniversary,” Savage Love (blog), Stranger, August 14,
2014, http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/08/14/sl-letter-of-the-day-
happy-anniversary.
3. See, e.g., Benoit Monin and Dale T. Miller, “Moral Credentials and the
Expression of Prejudice,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, no.
1 (2001): 33–43.

Notes to Introduction
1. This wording is from Plato’s Theory of Knowledge: The Theaetetus and
The Sophist, trans. Francis Cornford (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957),
available at Archive.org,
https://archive.org/stream/theaetetus00plat/theaetetus00plat_djvu.txt.
2. December 29, 2015.
3. From Simon Rich, The Last Girlfriend on Earth and Other Love Stories
(New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2013).
4. See, e.g., “What Is Love?,” Economist, December 17, 2008,
http://www.economist.com/node/12800025; Jim Al-Khalili et al., “What Is
Love? Five Theories on the Greatest Emotion of All,” Guardian, December 13,
2012, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/13/what-is-love-
five-theories.
5. bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York: William Morrow,
2000).
 6. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1963).
7. John Shand, “Love as If,” Essays in Philosophy 12, no. 1 (2011): 4–17,
http://commons.pacificu.edu/eip/vol12/iss1/2.

Notes to Chapter 1
1. Keats is concerned with the loss of magic in nature generally, not in love
per se. It’s interesting to note that as its mysteries are praised, nature is feminized
as a “mother,” exemplifying what would later be identified as the feminine
mystique. Keats’s rainbow is also presented as feminine (a gender decision with
a venerable history: in ancient Greek mythology, the goddess Iris was associated
with the rainbow).
2. In “Some Remarks on Humor,” preface to A Subtreasury of American
Humor, ed. E. B. White and Katherine S. White (New York: Coward-McCann,
1941.)
3. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá discuss such models in chapters 6 and
7 of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (New York:
Harper, 2010).
4. Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love
(New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2004).
5. See Donatella Marazziti and Domenico Canale, “Hormonal Changes When
Falling in Love,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 29, no. 7 (August 2004): 931–936.
Interestingly, this study also looked at testosterone, finding that it tends to
increase in women and decrease in men during the early stages of love.
6. The philosophy nerd in me is actually interested in discussing this issue at
great length but will save it for another occasion.
7. See Robert Nozick, “Love’s Bond,” in The Examined Life: Philosophical
Meditations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).
8. I recently taught a seminar on romantic love, and several of my students
reported that something felt right about Nozick’s theory.
9. Julian Savulescu and Anders Sandberg, “Neuroenhancement of Love and
Marriage: The Chemicals Between Us,” Neuroethics 1, no. 1 (March 2008): 31–
44.
10. Brian D. Earp et al., “If I Could Just Stop Loving You: Anti-love
Biotechnology and the Ethics of a Chemical Breakup,” American Journal of
Bioethics 13, no. 11 (2013): 3–17.
11. See Hui Wang et al., “Histone Deacetylase Inhibitors Facilitate Partner
Preference Formation in Female Prairie Voles,” Nature Neuroscience 16 (2013):
919–924.
12. Sven Nyholm considers this question in “Love Troubles: Human
Attachment and Biomedical Enhancements,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 32,
no. 2 (May 2015): 190–202.
13. See K. D. O’Leary et al., “Is Long-Term Love More Than a Rare
Phenomenon? If So, What Are Its Correlates?,” Social Psychology and
Personality Science 3 (2012): 241–249.
14. See Bianca Acevedo et al. (including Fisher), “Neural Correlates of
Long-Term Intense Romantic Love,” Social Cognitive and Affective
Neuroscience (2011).
15. Helen Fisher, “The Brain in Love,” TED, February 2008,
https://www.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_studies_the_brain_in_love.
16. I discuss these issues in Carrie Jenkins, “Knowing Our Own Hearts: Self-
Reporting and the Science of Love,” forthcoming in Philosophical Issues.

Notes to Chapter 2
1. A study found that subjects rated one and the same smell significantly
worse when it was labeled “body odor” than when it was labeled “cheddar
cheese.” The results are reported in Ivan de Araujo et al., “Cognitive Modulation
of Olfactory Processing,” Neuron 46, no. 4 (May 2005): 671–679.
2. Anne Beall and Robert Sternberg, “The Social Construction of Love,”
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 12, no. 3 (August 1995): 417–438.
3. Williams Jankoviak and Edward Fischer, “A Cross-Cultural Perspective on
Romantic Love,” Ethnology 31, no. 2 (April 1992): 149–155.
4. Margaret Wente, “Race and Gender: I Feel Therefore I Am,” Globe and
Mail, June 19, 2015. The article may be read in full at
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/race-and-gender-i-feel-therefore-
i-am/article25039792, though I cannot say I recommend it.
5. I am repurposing the phrase. It has been used by other writers—notably
Scott Peck and bell hooks—with a different meaning. They had in mind that we
should think of love as being a matter of how someone acts: what they do rather
than just how they feel on the inside. My focus here is different: I am focusing
on what love does at the societal level (as opposed to what individuals do when
they are in love).
6. This list of features partly overlaps with (and is inspired by) the features of
genuine love identified by bell hooks in All About Love: New Visions (New
York: William Morrow, 2000). One important thing about this list is that it
directs attention toward features of love that are not all about feeling a certain
way. This forms an important part of hooks’s argument that abusive relationships
are not loving: abusive individuals’ merely feeling like they love their victims
does not mean that they actually do.

Notes to Chapter 3
1. Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, “Award
Ceremony Speech,” Nobelprize.org, 1950,
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1950/press.html.
2. Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals (New York: Liveright, 1929).
3. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins
of Modern Sexuality (New York: Harper, 2010); Daniel Bergner, What Do
Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (New York: Ecco,
2013).
4. Andreas Baranowski and Heiko Hecht, “Gender Differences and
Similarities in Receptivity to Sexual Invitations: Effects of Location and Risk
Perception,” Archives of Sexual Behaviour 44, no. 8 (April 2015).
5. Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield, “Gender Differences in Receptivity to
Sexual Offers,” Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality 2, no. 1 (1989): 39–
55.
6. Margaret Atwood, “Writing the Male Character,” in Second Words:
Selected Critical Prose (Toronto: Anansi, 1982).
7. Meredith Chivers and Amanda Timmers, “Effects of Gender and
Relationship Context in Audio Narratives on Genital and Subjective Sexual
Response in Heterosexual Women and Men,” Archives of Sexual Behaviour 41,
no. 1 (March 2012): 185–197.
8. The English version used here is Friedrich Engels, The Origins of Family,
Private Property, and the State, trans. Ernest Untermann (Chicago: Charles H.
Kerr & Co., 1902), available online at Archive.org,
http://www.archive.org/stream/theoriginofthefa33111gut/33111-8.txt.
9. See Elizabeth Brake, Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the
Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
10. “Project Vox” is a contemporary research enterprise that “seeks to recover
the lost voices of women who have been ignored in standard narratives of the
history of modern philosophy,” aiming “to change those narratives, thereby
changing what students around the world learn about philosophy’s history.” It
can be explored at “Project Vox,” Duke University Libraries,
http://projectvox.library.duke.edu/pg.
11. Simon May, Love: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2011).
12. A group of psychologists and philosophers (Meredith Meyer, Andrei
Cimpian, and Sarah-Jane Leslie) recently conducted empirical studies to explore
the hypothesis that “women are likely to be underrepresented in fields thought to
require raw intellectual talent—a sort of talent that women are stereotyped to
possess less of than men.” They found evidence that “the academic fields
believed by laypeople to require brilliance are also the fields with lower female
representation.” See Meredith Meyer, Andrei Cimpian, and Sarah-Jane Leslie,
“Women Are Underrepresented in Fields Where Success Is Believed to Require
Brilliance,” Frontiers of Psychology (March 11, 2015). The paper can be read
online at http://www.princeton.edu/~sjleslie/Frontiers2015.pdf.
13. The version cited is Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, trans.
Thomas Common (New York: Macmillan, 1910), available online at
Archive.org,
https://archive.org/stream/completenietasch10nietuoft/completenietasch10nietuoft_djvu.txt.
Nietzsche’s original German text was first published in 1882. The word “gay”
that appears in the standard English translation of this book’s title (used in the
main text) has nothing to do with queerness. It means (approximately) “happy,”
and the phrase “the gay science” refers to the technical skill or craft elements
involved in writing poetry.
14. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of
the Future, trans. Helen Zimmern (New York: Macmillan, 1907), available
online at Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-
h.htm. The original German text was first published in 1886.
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, trans.
Anthony M. Ludovici (New York: Macmillan, 1911), available online at
Archive.org, https://archive.org/details/TheCompleteWorksOfFriedrichNietz-
schevol.17-EcceHomo. The original German text was first published in 1908.
16. The version cited here is Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and
Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner
& Co., 1909), available online at Project Gutenberg,
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40868/40868-h/40868-h.html. Schopenhauer’s
original German text was published in 1818, and it is now commonly known as
The World as Will and Representation.
 17. For more on this idea, which has its roots in feminist standpoint theory,
see section 2.1 of Heidi Grasswick, “Feminist Social Epistemology,” Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2013, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-
social-epistemology.
18. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila
Malovany-Chevalier (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). The original French
text was published in 1949.
19. An excellent resource here is Sally Haslanger’s Resisting Reality: Social
Construction and Social Critique (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
20. Berit Brogaard, On Romantic Love: Simple Truths About a Complex
Emotion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Notes to Chapter 4
1. This hypothesis is popular; it comes up often in conversations with
audiences when I present work on the nature of love.
2. This is my sense of the theory presented in Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and
Richard Lannon’s A General Theory of Love (New York: Vintage Books, 2000).
Lewis and his coauthors are not very clear about their metaphysics of love. (This
is not a criticism. Their goals differ from mine: they are psychiatrists, motivated
by clinical effectiveness.) However, it seems to me that while they claim that art
and poetry are sources of insight concerning love, their theory is ultimately
neurobiological.
3. In About Love: Reinventing Romance for Our Times (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), philosopher Robert Solomon takes this position.
Solomon calls romantic love “one of the great ongoing innovations of Western
culture,” saying that although it “may begin” in biology, it is ultimately “a social
invention.”
4. One example of this occurs in Julian Savulescu and Anders Sandberg,
“Neuroenhancement of Love and Marriage: The Chemicals Between Us,”
Neuroethics 1, no. 1 (March 2008): 31–44. The authors say, “The evolutionary
systems form a ground on top of which the cultural and individual variants of
love are built.” But they do not explain this “grounding” metaphor except by
mentioning cultural differences in “expression” (which returns us to the first
strategy on the list).
5. The strategy I’m going to try is inspired by a tradition in twentieth- and
twenty-first-century metaphysics, associated with Australian philosophers David
Lewis and Frank Jackson, known as “The Canberra Plan.” For an accessible
introduction to some of this background, I recommend Daniel Nolan, David
Lewis (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), esp. chap. 9 (“Some
Reflections on Lewis’s Method”).
6. Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic
Relationships (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 2013).
7. This is highlighted in Niko Bell, “Love Sense Author Says We’re (Mostly)
Like Monogamous Voles,” Xtra Vancouver, January 26, 2014,
http://dailyxtra.com/vancouver/news-and-ideas/newestlove-sense-author-says-
we’re-mostly-like-monogamous-voles-78045.
8. Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love
(New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2004).
9. Timothy Taylor, The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course
of Human Evolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). A summary of
some of the core ideas can be found in David Keys, “Prehistoric Baby Sling
‘Made Our Brains Bigger,’” Independent, September 6, 2010,
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history/prehistoric-baby-sling-made-
our-brains-bigger-2071291.html.
10. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá discuss such models in chapters 6
and 7 of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (New York:
Harper, 2010).
11. See K. E. Starkweather and R. Hames, “A Survey of Non-Classical
Polyandry,” Human Nature 23, no. 2 (2012): 149–172.
12. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric
Origins of Modern Sexuality (New York: Harper, 2010).
13. Rafael Wlodarski, John Manning, and R. I. M. Dunbar, “Stay or Stray?
Evidence for Alternative Mating Strategy Phenotypes in Both Men and Women,”
Biology Letters 11, no. 2 (February 2015).
14. Dietrich Klusmann, “Sexual Motivation and the Duration of Partnership,”
Archives of Sexual Behaviour 31, no. 3 (June 2002): 275–287.
15. Meredith L. Chivers and Amanda D. Timmers, “Effects of Gender and
Relationship Context in Audio Narratives on Genital and Subjective Sexual
Response in Heterosexual Women and Men,” Archives of Sexual Behaviour 41,
no. 1 (February 2012): 185–197.
16. Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love
(New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2004).
17. Television has given Kilgrave the impression that he is entitled to a
woman if he wants her and that abusive behaviors like stalking will eventually
win her heart (as in romantic comedies). In chapter 6, I’ll say more about the
damaging gender norms built into society’s image of romantic love.
18. Eva Illouz’s Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation (Cambridge,
UK: Polity Press, 2012) is a fascinating exploration of the significance of choice
in modern romantic love and how it interacts with economic considerations and
gender roles. Illouz challenges the view of romantic love as an individualistic
phenomenon, highlighting the extent to which it is shaped by institutional and
cultural forces on a larger scale.
19. Elizabeth Brake’s Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the
Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) explores this phenomenon in
depth.
20. Berit Brogaard, On Romantic Love: Simple Truths About a Complex
Emotion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Notes to Chapter 5
1. If you work in a coffee shop and run this last experiment with your tip jars,
I would love to hear the results.
2. For overviews of some recent work on this kind of phenomenon, see
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics
and Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012), or Cordelia Fine, “The
Pigheaded Brain,” in A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives
(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006).
3. In contemporary studies, people in love with same-sex partners are found
to be exhibiting just the same brain activity as opposite-sex partners when
viewing images of loved ones. A study by neurobiologists Semir Zeki and John
Paul Romayna found that when subjects viewed loved partners, “the pattern of
activation and de-activation was very similar in the brains of males and females,
and heterosexuals and homosexuals. We could therefore detect no difference in
activation patterns between these groups.” See Semir Zeki and John Paul
Romayna, “The Brain Reaction to Viewing Faces of Opposite- and Same-Sex
Romantic Partners,” PLoS ONE 5, no. 12 (2006).
4. Lord Holt in R v. Mawgridge, 1707. Sue Bandalli discusses this case and
this wording in “Provocation: A Cautionary Note,” Journal of Law and Society
22, no. 3 (September 1995): 398–409. Bandalli argues that provocation is
unlikely to work as a defense for a woman since “ultimately the success or
failure of a provocation defence depends on ingrained cultural judgment, and the
hidden agenda of this partial defence, as it operates in practice in spousal
homicide, is one of female responsibility, whether as victim or offender.”
5. Harriet Harman, UK women’s minister at the time of the change, is quoted
on this point in Simon Maybin, “Are Murder Laws Sexist?,” BBC, October 15,
2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29612916.
6. The law and its previous versions can be accessed at “Criminal Code
(R.S.C., 1985, c. C-46),” Justice Laws website, http://laws-
lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-232.html.
7. This code is not itself law, but its provisions have been adopted (in part or
in whole) by many individual states.
8. Details of these cases and others can be found in Victoria Nourse,
“Passion’s Progress: Modern Law Reform and the Provocation Defense,” Yale
Law Journal 106, no. 5 (March 1997): 1331–1448.
9. The guidelines can be found on the US Sentencing Commission website,
“2015 Chapter 5,” http://www.ussc.gov/guidelines-manual/2015/2015-chapter-5.
10. In a 2014 article on the “gay panic” defense. See Justin Ling, “Why Do
Canadian Courts Still Allow the ‘Gay Panic’ Defence?,” Daily Xtra, February 8,
2014, http://www.dailyxtra.com/canada/news-and-ideas/news/canadian-courts-
still-allow-the-gay-panic%E2%80%99-defence-78795.
11. The wording can be found on the California Legislative Information
website, “AB-2501 Voluntary Manslaughter (2013–2014),”
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?
bill_id=201320140AB2501.
12. You can find information about how nonconscious (or “implicit”)
associations work at “Project Implicit,” Harvard University,
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/faqs.html.
13. These statistics are from the FBI, accessible at “Crime in the United
States 2013,” FBI, https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-
u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-
homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_10_murder_circumstances_by_relationship_2013.x
and https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-
u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide. (The
categories for “wife” and “husband” include common-law spouses and ex-
spouses.)
14. As reported in the full text of the case in the Supreme Court, available at
“Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1 (1967),” Nolo,
http://supreme.nolo.com/us/388/1/case.html.
15. See Frank Newport, “In U.S., 87% Approve of Black-White Marriage, vs.
4% in 1958,” Gallup, July 25, 2013,
http://www.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-whites.aspx.
16. Maria Root, Love’s Revolution: Interracial Marriage (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2001).

Notes to Chapter 6
1. Lisa Grunwald and Stephen Adler, The Marriage Book: Centuries of
Advice, Inspiration, and Cautionary Tales from Adam and Eve to Zoloft (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2015).
2. Some representative statistics from the United States can be found in
summaries of the American Time Use Surveys published by the Bureau of Labor
Statistics. Recent figures are available at “American Time Use Survey
Summary,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, June 24, 2015,
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm.
3. Marianne Bertrand, Emir Kamenica, and Jessica Pan, “Gender Identity and
Relative Income Within Households,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 130, no.
2 (2015): 571–614. These data are for hetero married couples in the United
States in which both husband and wife earn positive income and are aged
eighteen to sixty-five.
4. Marianne Bertrand et al. report, “The distribution of the share of income
earned by the wife exhibits a sharp drop to the right of 1/2, where the wife’s
income exceeds the husband’s income.”
5. A summary of the current situation can be found at Sara Ashley O’Brien,
“78 Cents on the Dollar: The Facts About the Gender Wage Gap,” CNN Money,
April 14, 2015, http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/13/news/economy/equal-pay-
day-2015.
6. Bertrand and her coauthors borrow this phrase from the title of Arlie
Russell Hochschild and Anne Machung’s The Second Shift: Working Parents
and the Revolution at Home (New York: Viking, 1989).
7. Laurie Rudman and Jessica Heppen, “Implicit Romantic Fantasies and
Women’s Interest in Personal Power,” Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin 29, no. 11 (November 2003): 1357–1370.
8. The same metaphor is developed extensively in Susan Weisser, The Glass
Slipper: Women and Love Stories (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2013). This book critiques the social “script” for romantic love from a
feminist perspective by means of a thorough examination of love stories.
9. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila
Malovany-Chevalier (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).
10. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist
Revolution (New York: William Morrow, 1970.)
11. Terri Conley et al., “The Fewer the Merrier? Assessing Stigma
Surrounding Consensually Non-monogamous Romantic Relationships,”
Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 13, no. 1 (December 2013): 1–30.
12. Kat Stoeffel, “Meet Terri Conley: The Psychologist with an Alternative
Theory of Hookup Culture,” New York Times Magazine, February 4, 2014,
http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/02/woman-with-an-alternative-theory-of-
hookups.html.
13. If my boyfriend had been gay, that could have been tolerated because, as
his father pointed out to him, “even Obama says gays are OK” these days.
14. There was a conviction for adultery in Virginia in 2004. The penalty was
community service. An interesting discussion of this case appeared the same
year: Jonathan Turley, “Of Lust and the Law,” Washington Post, September 5,
2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62581-2004Sep4.html.
The article points out that this was an opportunity to overturn an outdated law,
but because the accused eventually accepted punishment, this was not possible.
15. This particular phrasing comes from the testimony of a poly gay man in a
three-person relationship: Victor M. Feraru, “Will Polygamy Have Its Day in the
Sun?,” HuffPost Queer Voices (blog), July 23, 2013,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-lopez/will-polygamy-have-its-day-in-the-
sun_b_3629785.html.
16. Jonathan Frakes, dir., Star Trek: First Contact (Los Angeles, CA:
Paramount Pictures, 1996).
17. Eli Lehrer, “Gay Marriage Good, Polyamory Bad,” HuffPost Politics,
January 23, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eli-lehrer/gay-marriage-good-
polyamo_b_4165423.html.
18. Some analysis of longitudinal data on class and educational similarities
among spouses can be found in Monika Krzyżanowska and C. G. Nicholas
Mascie-Taylor, “Educational and Social Class Assortative Mating in Fertile
British Couples,” Annals of Human Biology 41, no. 6 (2014): 561–567. Over 60
percent of the couples they studied had identical levels of education.
19. In the early chapters of Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation
(Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), sociologist Eva Illouz discusses how
certain formal restrictions on marrying outside one’s social class were dissolved
during the twentieth century and how that impacted women’s and men’s
experiences of romantic love.
20. See Elizabeth Armstrong et al., “‘Good Girls’: Gender, Social Class, and
Slut Discourse on Campus,” Social Psychology Quarterly 77, no. 2 (June 2014):
100–122.
21. It’s not lost on me that I am privileged to be able to talk about my
polyamory in this book without immediate fear of losing my job, my home, or
my family. Bertrand Russell appears to express something similar—though at a
rather more advanced level—in a wry footnote in Marriage and Morals (New
York: Liveright, 1929). In the main text he has been explaining that a
professional man would lose his job for living in “open sin,” but the footnote
adds, “Unless he happens to teach at one of the older universities and to be
closely related to a peer who has been a Cabinet minister.”
22. The word “spinster” has undergone some recent attempts at reclamation,
with limited success. See, for example, Kate Bolick’s Spinster: Making a Life of
One’s Own (New York: Crown Publishers, 2015).
23. See Michel Reynaud et al., “Is Love Passion an Addictive Disorder?,”
American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse 36, no. 5 (September 2010): 261–
267.
24. Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals (New York: Liveright, 1929).
25. Marina Adshade, “Actually, Men Have Always Wanted Children More
Than Women Have,” Globe and Mail, March 30, 2015,
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/actually-men-have-always-
wanted-children-more-than-women/article23681771.
26. This is a point that Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá emphasize in Sex
at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (New York: Harper,
2010).

Notes to Chapter 7
1. Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, A General Theory of
Love (New York: Vintage Books, 2000).
2. Paul MacLean developed the idea of a “limbic system” in the 1940s and
1950s. It has proved controversial; Joseph LeDoux provides a summary of
objections to it in The Emotional Brain (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
3. See Christopher Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999), for a tour of some of this history.
4. See Lawrence Babb, “The Physiological Conception of Love in the
Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama,” Publications of the Modern Language
Association of America 56, no. 4 (December 1941).
5. Today we have only fragments of Sappho’s work; this one is known as
fragment 31.
6. This wording comes from Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9, trans. Harold
N. Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), available through
Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University,
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?
doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174%3Atext%3DPhaedrus%3Asection%3D245c.
7. Here I again draw upon Babb’s “The Physiological Conception of Love in
the Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama.”
8. André du Laurens, Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight, of
Melancholike Diseases, of Rheumes, and of Old Age, translation of 1599 by
Richard Surphlet (London: Shakespeare Association Facsimiles, 1938).
9. Ovid, Remedia Amoris, in The Art of Love and Other Poems, trans. J. H.
Mozley; rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979),
available through the digital Loeb Classical Library,
http://www.loebclassics.com/view/ovid-
remedies_love/1929/pb_LCL232.177.xml.
10. Joseph Frascella et al., “Shared Brain Vulnerabilities Open the Way for
Non-substance Addictions: Carving Addiction at a New Joint?,” Annals of the
New York Academy of Sciences 1187 (February 2010): 294–315.
11. Brian Earp et al., “Addicted to Love: What Is Love Addiction and When
Should It Be Treated?,” Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology (2015). See also
Brian Earp et al., “If I Could Just Stop Loving You: Anti-love Biotechnology
and the Ethics of a Chemical Breakup,” American Journal of Bioethics 13, no.
11 (2013): 3–17.
12. See Julian Savulescu and Anders Sandberg, “Neuroenhancement of Love
and Marriage: The Chemicals Between Us,” Neuroethics 1, no. 1 (March 2008):
31–44.
13. See Fiona Macdonald, “Scientists Can Now Tell If You’re in Love by
Scanning Your Brain,” Science Alert, March 16, 2015,
http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-can-now-tell-if-you-re-in-love-by-
scanning-your-brain.
14. Hongwen Song et al., “Love-Related Changes in the Brain: A Resting-
State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study,” Frontiers of Human
Neuroscience (February 13, 2015),
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25762915.
 15. Among other issues, the questionnaire assumes that passionate love is
monogamous. I discuss this and other methodological problems for studies of
romantic love in Carrie Jenkins, “Knowing Our Own Hearts: Self-Reporting and
the Science of Love,” forthcoming in Philosophical Issues.

Notes to Coda
1. At the biological level, love can even share overlapping brain circuitry
with sexual desire. See, for example, Stephanie Cacioppo et al., “The Common
Neural Bases Between Sexual Desire and Love: A Multilevel Kernel Density
fMRI Analysis,” Journal of Sexual Medicine 9, no. 4 (April 2012): 947–1232.
2. See “Esther Perel: The Secret to Desire in a Long-Term Relationship,”
TED, February 2013,
https://www.ted.com/talks/esther_perel_the_secret_to_desire_in_a_long_term_relationship.
3. Brian D. Earp, Anders Sandberg, and Julian Savulescu, “Natural Selection,
Childrearing, and the Ethics of Marriage (and Divorce): Building a Case for the
Neuroenhancement of Human Relationships,” Philosophy and Technology 25,
no. 4 (December 2012): 561–587.
4. See Frank Newport, “In U.S., 87% Approve of Black-White Marriage, vs.
4% in 1958,” Gallup, July 25, 2013,
http://www.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-whites.aspx.
5. Such traditionalism is often explicitly premised on ideas about what
Christianity requires in marriage. See, for example, Stephanie Samuel, “Should
Couples Personalize Their Marriage Vows? Russell Moore Says No,” Christian
Post, November 13, 2014, http://www.christianpost.com/news/russell-moore-on-
personalize-vows-marriage-is-about-accountability-to-the-entire-body-of-christ-
129606.
6. See Daniel Nolan, “Temporary Marriage,” in After Marriage: Rethinking
Marital Relationships, ed. Elizabeth Brake (New York: Oxford University Press,
2016).
7. This wording is from a message sent to me by a stranger.
8. In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation titled “The Outcast”
(Robert Scheerer, dir., air date March 14, 1992), a structurally similar possibility
is envisaged: an alien society engaging in the cultural and medical suppression
of gender.
 Index

A10 cells, 31
abuse, 6, 8, 127, 158–159, 162
actor analogy, 82–84, 101, 108, 170
Adam and Eve story, 97
“Addicted to Love” (song), 157
addiction, 31, 32, 141, 157–158
Adler, Stephen, 124
Adshade, Marina, 143–144
adultery, 71, 112, 134, 171–172, 176
agape, 41
alien society analogy, 107–108
All About Love (hooks), 6
amatonormativity, 65, 103, 141, 142, 145, 180
Amini, Fari, 147
analytic metaphysics, 11–12
analytic philosophy, 12, 68, 76
Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton), 154
antimiscegenation laws, 117, 173
Aristophanes myth, 4–5
The Artificial Ape (Taylor), 90
As You Like It (Shakespeare), 152
attachment
abusive, 159
as romantic love, 22
association with oxytocin and vasopressin, 22, 23, 86
evolutionary explanation for, 24, 87, 88
root of in “limbic system,” 148
Atwood, Margaret, 62
Babb, Lawrence, 154
baby slings, 90
Baranowski, Andreas, 61–62
Beall, Anne, 42–45, 75, 109, 119
Beauvoir, Simone de, 73–74, 129–130
behavioral/therapeutic interventions, 155–156
Bergner, Daniel, 61
Bertrand, Marianne, 127, 128
Beyoncé, 126, 153
Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 69
Bierce, Ambrose, 37
binaries, 105–106
biological determinism, 111–116, 149
biological markers, 42
biology of love
addiction, 31–32, 141, 157–158
behavioral/therapeutic interventions, 155–156
biological/medical interventions, 27–28, 149–151, 154, 169
evolution, 24, 87–90, 100, 116–117
false attributions to biology, 85–86, 94–95, 99
four humors theory, 20
hormones, 21–23, 25, 27, 28
importance for philosophy, 89
love as neurochemical cocktail, 29, 100
lust, evolutionary explanation for, 24
methodology, questions about, 32–33, 96–97
philosophical concerns about, 33–35
same-sex love, 110–111, 116
as sexual desire, 20
social bonding and cooperation, 91
symptoms of, 152, 156–157, 177–178
universality of, 46–47, 83, 141–142
See also brain; Fisher
biology-society dilemma, 2–3, 47, 80–81
bipedalism, 24, 88–90
brain
A10 cells, 31
activity, 29–31
caudate nucleus, 21
 cortisol, 21, 27
dopamine, 21, 22, 25, 27, 28, 42
fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), 21, 25, 164
oxytocin, 22, 23, 28, 42, 86, 100, 178
testosterone, 22, 28
variability of love chemistry, 29, 30
vasopressin, 22, 23, 28
ventral tegmental area, 21, 157
“The Brain in Love” (Fisher’s TED talk), 31
Brake, Elizabeth, 65
Brogaard, Berit, 75, 102
Brown, Lucy, 157
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV show), 150
Burton, Robert, 154
Canada
data on preferred number of children, 143–144
implications of falling in love in, 43
provocation, as legal defense, 113
casual sex, 61–62
caudate nucleus, 21
change
in acceptance of same-sex love, 140–141
of cultural norms, 53–54, 85, 99, 109–110, 113, 131
future, 173–182
influence of biology on, 27, 34, 121
in interracial love, 173
in love and marriage, 40–41
as normal process, 120
in romantic love, 148–149
slowness of, xiv, 115, 168–169
to social role of love, 119–121, 177
chemical breakup drugs, 28
chemical castration, 159
child rearing, 88, 91–92, 96, 175
“The Children of the Dirt” (Rich), 5
Chinese culture and romantic love, 45
Chivers, Meredith, 62, 95
Christianity, role of in oppression of women, 60
composite image of love
amatonormativity, 142
changing, 144–146
customizing, 180–181
literature, 151–153
monogamy, 174–176
patterns, 129
popular representations of love, 97–99, 131
presence of “normal” features, 102, 132
Conley, Terri, 133–134
conversion therapy, 159
cortisol, 21, 27
“Crazy In Love” (song), 153
“A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Romantic Love” (Jankoviak and Fischer), 46
daiquiri analogy, 29–30
definite descriptions, theory of, 56
The Dialectic of Sex (Firestone), 130
Diotima, 75
disability, love as, 156–157
Donne, John, 79
dopamine, 21, 22, 25, 27, 28, 42, 100, 177
drugs, use of, 158–163, 169–170
dual-nature theory, 12–14, 80–83, 108, 110–111, 116, 164, 179–180
Dunbar, Robin, 93
Earp, Brian, 171–172
Ecce Homo (Nietzsche), 70
Engels, Friedrich, 63–64
Enlightenment, social construct of love during, 44, 48, 75–76
epigenetic effects, 28
equitable distribution argument, 160–161, 172
eros, 4, 41, 153
evolution, 24, 87–90, 100, 116–117
experiences, influence of, ix, 26, 64
extramarital sex, 64, 172
Facebook, 125
faithfulness, 39, 71–72, 112
female sexual dysfunction drug, 169–170
feminine mystique, 7, 69
feminism, 8, 70, 85, 129–130
financial inequality analogy, 137
Firestone, Shulamith, 129–130
Fischer, Edward, 46–47
Fisher, Helen, biological theory of love
attachment as separate from romantic love, 23
brain region and chemical involvement, 21–23, 25, 100
evolution, 24, 87–90, 100, 116–117
individual variations, 29
Jenkins’s analysis of, 23–26, 32–35, 87–90, 95–97, 100–101
love as basic human drive, 21–22, 25
as standard model approach, 91–92, 95–97
“The Brain in Love” (TED talk), 31
Flibanserin, 169–170
fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), 21, 25, 164
Ford, Henry, 145
Foreigner, 4
four humors theory, 20, 150–151
free love, 57, 168
Friedan, Betty, 7, 69
future, predictions for
customizing relationships, 180–182
dual nature of love, 179–180
monogamy, 174–176
polyamory, 179
romantic love, 176–178
garage sale analogy, 77
The Gay Science (Nietzsche), 69
gay/trans panic, 114
gender assignment, 41–42
gender pay gap, 128
gender roles, 41, 87, 91, 94, 112, 128–131
A General Theory of Love (Lewis, Amini, and Lannon), 148
Gilbert, W. S., 152
glass slipper effect, 128–129
Globe and Mail, 49, 143–144
Google, 5–6
Greeks, ancient
four humors theory, 150–151
kinds of love, 41
love poetry, 151–152
philosophical theories of love, 4–5, 75
marriage customs, 40
Grunwald, Lisa, 124
Haddaway, 4
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Rowling), 150
hate crimes, 114
Hecht, Heiko, 61–62
Heppen, Jessica, 128
Her (film), xii, 33
heteronormativity, 66, 72, 110, 130, 131, 132
Hippocrates, 150
historic views of love
ancient Greece, 4–5, 41, 75, 150–152
Renaissance, 20, 154–155
Romantic era, 44, 48
Victorian era, 43–44
Hollywood, nonmonogamy in, 134
homophobia, 20, 85, 114
homosexuality, 50, 57, 108. See also queer love; same-sex relationships
hooks, bell, 6, 8, 159
horse and carriage analogy, 123–124
HuffPost blog, on polyamory and same-sex marriage, 135
hypothalamus, 23
“I Want to Know What Love Is” (song), 4
ingroups and outgroups, 106
Internet, x, xii
interracial relationships, 117–118, 131, 139, 173
interventions, behavioral/therapeutic, 154–156, 169
interventions, medical/biological, 27–28, 149–151, 154, 169
Jankoviak, Williams, 46–47
jealousy, 60, 112, 152, 171
Jenkins, Carrie, personal experiences of, ix–xi, xiii, 38, 79–80, 102–103, 132,
134, 143
Jessica Jones (TV show), 97
Jethá, Cacilda, 19, 61, 92
Johnson, Sue, 86
Jonze, Spike, xii
K-I-S-S-I-N-G rhyme, 51, 60, 87, 97, 132
Kamenica, Emir, 127
Keats, John, 18
Kennedy, Anthony, 180
Kirkup, Kyle, 114
The Kiss (Klimt), 97
Klimt, Gustav, 97
Klusmann, Dietrich, 94
language,
social significance of, xi, 38–39, 113–114, 139, 141, 158–159, 161
theoretical significance of, 22, 76
Lannon, Richard, 147
Laurens, André du, 154
laws, 50
Lehrer, Eli, 135–136
L’elisir d’amour (Donizetti opera), 150
lesbians, 96, 108–109
Lewis, Thomas, 147
limbic system, 148
love. See romantic love
Love: A History (May), 67, 72
love-conquers-all narratives, 138
love-melancholy, 20, 154, 158
love potions, 150
Love Sense (Johnson), 86
Love’s Revolution: Interracial Marriage (Root), 118
Loving v. Virginia (1967), 117
lust
in ancient Greece, 41
association with testosterone, 22
chemically induced, 160
 evolutionary explanation for, 24
in relationships, 94–95
madness, 152–153
magic
kinds of, 149–151
of love, 9, 14, 17, 19, 100
in nature, 18
Manning, John, 93
marital rape, 169
marriage
in ancient Greece, 40
arranged, 48
equality, 125–126
faithfulness, 71–72, 72
interracial, 117–118
love-marriage connection, 40–41, 51, 59–60, 98, 123–127, 131
morganatic, 138
open, 60
as property transaction, 40, 124
purpose, 59–60, 63
romantic love and, 40–41
same-sex, 109, 135
temporary, 93, 174–175
traditional, 124, 145
Marriage and Morals (Russell), 56–59, 68–69, 172
The Marriage Book (Grunwald and Adler), 124
mass media, xii, xv
Match.com, 19
maternal instinct, 21
May, Simon, 67
medical/biological interventions, 27–28, 149–151, 154, 169
medicalization of love, 151–154, 156–158
medicine analogy, 18
melancholy, 151
men
casual sex, 62
desire for children, 143–144
 dangers of romantic love for, 74
dominance of philosophy by, 68–69
extramarital sex, 172
faithfulness, 71
gender roles, 112, 127
men’s rights activists, 70, 155
monogamy and, 60, 63, 86
Nietzsche’s view of, 69
patriarchal polygamy, 135–136
sex-related violence by, 112–115
stud as positive appellation, 139
See also patriarchy
metaphysics, 1–2, 11
The Mikado (Gilbert and Sullivan), 152
Mills, Charles, 74
monogamy
Bertrand Russell on, 60–61, 63
child care and, 91–92
evolutionary theory of, 24, 87–88
female neediness and, 88, 94
future of, 174–176
halo effect, 134
in Hollywood, 134
men and, 60, 63, 86
as natural for humans, 63, 80, 86–88
patriarchal, 92
philosophers’ treatment of, x–xi
same-sex relationships and, 133–135
sex and, 60–61, 63, 71
as social norm, 80, 133–135
temporary, 93, 174–175
women and, 63, 94–95
See also nonmonogamy
Moore, G. E., 11
morganatic marriage, 138
“Mother’s Little Helper” (song), 170
natural behavior, perceptions of
 as biological phenomenon, 19, 54, 79–80, 83, 120
dominant ideology and, 85–86, 89, 115, 117, 144
monogamy, 63, 80, 86, 88
social construct, 40–41
toxic behaviors, justification for, 112
for women, 69–74, 95
neurochemicals, 22
neuroscience, love and, 13
neurotransmitters, 21
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 69–72, 156
Nolan, Daniel, 174
nonmonogamy, xii–xv, 93, 102, 133, 139, 140, 172
nontraditional love
in mass media, xv
polyamory, xii, 39, 133, 135, 140, 175, 179
polyandry, 92
polygamy, 91–92, 135
safety issues, 134
See also nonmonogamy; same-sex relationships
Nozick, Robert, 22–23, 30, 65
nuclear family
children and, 140, 175
as cooperative group, 91
female neediness, 88–90, 94, 116–117
as tool of patriarchy, 130
polyamory and, 140
romantic love and, 41, 48, 51–53, 60, 98–99, 101, 118
same-sex, 133, 140
social norms and, 145
Obama, Barack, 125
objectivity, difficulties with, xv–xvi
OKCupid (website), x
On Romantic Love (Brogaard), 75, 102
one-true-love-forever model, 168–171, 174
The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (Engels), 63
online dating, 132
Match.com, 19
 OKCupid, x
Outlaw, Lucius, 74
overthinking love, 9–10, 153, 181
Ovid, 70, 155, 156
oxytocin, 22, 23, 28, 42, 86, 100, 178
pair-bonding, 24
Palmer, Robert, 157
Pan, Jessica, 127
patriarchal monogamy, 92
patriarchal polygamy, 91, 135–136
patriarchy, 60, 74, 129, 130
Perel, Esther, 169
Phaedrus (Plato), 153
phenotypes of mating strategy, 93
philia, 41
philosophers
Beauvoir, Simone de 73–74, 129–130
Brake, Elizabeth 65
Brogaard, Berit 75, 102
Earp, Brian 171–172
Engels, Friedrich 63–64
Firestone, Shulamith 129–130
May, Simon 67
Mills, Charles 74
Nietzsche, Friedrich 69–72, 156
Nolan, Daniel 174
Nozick, Robert 22–23, 30, 65
Outlaw, Lucius 74
Plato, 1, 4–5, 59, 75, 153
Russell, Bertrand 56–61, 63–66, 68, 76
Sandberg, Anders 171
Savulescu, Julian 171
Schopenhauer, Arthur 20, 71–72, 86
Shand, John 9–10
Socrates, 59, 75
Turing, Alan, 50
Wollstonecraft, Mary 74
philosophy
nature of, 1–2, 12, 58–59, 77
fallibility of, 77
male dominance of, 67, 71
privilege as hindrance, 72–73
Picard, Jean-Luc, 135
Plato, 1, 4–5, 59, 75, 153
politicization of love, 167–168
polyamory, xii, 39, 133, 135, 140, 175, 179
polyandry, 92
polygamy, 91–92, 135
popular culture, love in, 4
Porter, Cole, 4
prairie voles, 28, 86
premarital sex, 64
promiscuity, 38, 93, 139
provocation, as legal defense, 112–114
psychology, view of love, 3
Quarterly Journal of Economics, on household income data, 127
Queen, 153
queer love
biology of, 110–111, 116
as deviation from norm, 85
homophobia, 85, 114
romantic love, 115, 118, 119, 140, 159
See also homosexuality; same-sex relationships
queer men, violence against, 114
race, used as impediment to love, 111, 118, 173
social construction of, 49, 74
and biology, 85, 100, 117
relationships
customizing, 180–181
interracial, 117–118, 131, 139, 173
nonmonogamous, xii–xv, 93, 102, 133, 139, 140, 172
polyamorous, xii, 39, 133, 135, 140, 175, 179
in popular culture, 4
See also monogamy; same-sex
religion
used as impediment to love, 111, 118
love-marriage connection, 97
oppression of women, 60
“Remedia Amoris” (Ovid), 155
Renaissance medicine, 20, 154–155
reproduction-love connection, 51, 53, 87–88, 95–99, 143, 145
Republic (Plato), 59
Reynaud, Michel, 141
Rich, Simon, 5
Rolling Stones, 170
Roman’s eulogy for wife, 124–125
Romantic era, love in, 44, 48
romantic love
Beall-Sternberg theory, 42–45, 75, 109, 119
capacity for change, 103–104
“curing” love, 149, 151, 154–156, 158–159, 162, 164
dangers of, 74
dual-nature theory, 12–14, 80–83, 108, 110–111, 116, 164, 179–180
features of, 52
four humors theory, 20, 150–151
function of, 48, 51–53, 59–60, 98, 101, 118, 133, 137, 140, 142, 178
future of, 176–178
historic views of, 20, 43–44, 152–155
as “human universal” on “biological core,” 46
importance of understanding, 8, 10–11
inclusiveness, xiii–xiv, 103
interventions, 27–28, 149–151, 154, 155–156, 169
Jankoviak-Fischer theory, 46–47
Lewis-Amini-Lannon theory, 147–148
love-marriage connection, 40–41, 51, 59–60, 98, 123–127, 131
love-reproduction connection, 51, 53, 87–88, 95–99, 143, 145
metaphysical questions about, 2
as mystery, 7–8
Nozick theory, 22–23, 30, 65
philosophers’ view of, x–xi, 3
politicization of, 167–168
 public demand for information about, 18
rationality of, 44, 76
as recent phenomenon, 40
refusal to acknowledge, 118–119
romantic love-private property connection, 112–113, 136, 161, 175, 176
safety issues for nontraditionalists, 134
saying “I love you,” 6
science of, 17–19, 26–35
society’s regulation of, 119
tenacity of, 176–177
variations of, 102
as women’s concern, 8
See also biology of love; Fisher; Russell; same-sex relationships; social
constructionism
romantic mystique, 7–9, 17–19, 148, 165
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 97
Root, Maria, 118
Rossetti, Christina, 123
Rudman, Laurie, 128
Russell, Bertrand
amatonormative attitude, 65–66
on children’s effect on marriage, 175
desire to “excite protest,” 56
as founder of analytic philosophy, 11–12
on gendered desire for children, 143–144
heteronormative attitude of, 66
on jealousy, 172
love, views on, 59–60, 65
marriage, views on, 60
messages to future generations, 179
Nobel Prize for Literature, 56
on oppression of women, 60–61
perception of philosophy as male activity, 68
sex, views on, 56–57, 56–61
sex-positive movement and, 56
social class advantage, 57
theory of definite descriptions, 56
 on widely held opinions, 173
on wisdom of loving, 76
on women’s sexuality, 169
Ryan, Christopher, 19, 61, 92
same-sex relationships
Aristophanes myth, 5
attempts to “cure,” 159
Fisher’s explanation for, 95–96
laws against, 50, 57
monogamy and, 133–135
refusal to acknowledge love, 118–119
romantic love and, 108–109, 115, 130–131
social acceptance of, 140–141
social change, 110–111
See also homosexuality; queer love
Sandberg, Anders, 171
Sappho, 151–152
Savage, Dan, xii, 57, 60
Savulescu, Julian, 171
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 20, 71–72, 86
Science Alert (website), 163
science of love, 17–19, 26–35
scientific method, advantages of, 27
The Second Sex (de Beauvoir), 73–74, 129
Serenity Prayer, 147, 165
sex
casual, 61–62
extramarital, 64
monogamy and, 60–61, 63, 71
premarital, 64
promiscuity, 38, 93, 139
Russell’s view of, 56–57, 59
Schopenhauer’s view of, 71
in Victorian culture, 44
Sex at Dawn (Ryan and Jethá), 19, 61, 92
sex-positive movement, 56, 64
sexual desire
 and women, 60–61, 94–95
connection to romantic love, 43, 51, 53, 98, 169–170
in Victorian era, 43
Shakespeare, William, 17, 55, 97, 105, 152, 153, 167
Shand, John, 9–10
Shatner, William aka Captain Kirk, 84
short-term promiscuous bonding, 93
slut, meaning of, 38
slut shaming, 138–139
slut-versus-stud phenomenon, 139
soccer game analogy, 120
social class
and privilege, 57, 67, 72
love and, 111, 118, 138
relationship to gender and nonmonogamy, 137–139
“The Social Construction of Love” (Beall and Sternberg), 42
social constructionism
changes to love’s social role, 119–121, 177
cultural representations, 97–99
cultural variations, 44–45
current norms, 99
falling in love, 43
familiarity, role of, 40
function of romantic love, 48, 52–53, 59–60
gender stereotypes, 41, 73, 125, 127–131, 145, 160, 173, 175
influence of society, 37–38, 42, 45
Jenkins’s analysis of, 45–54
localization of, 83
need for change, 144–145
reactions to author’s lifestyle, 38
reality of social constructs, 49
as social force, 6–7
traditional love as “normal,” xiv–xv, 45, 51–52, 65
variety of social structures, 52
See also same-sex relationships
social stability, 137–140, 142, 168, 175
society-biology dilemma, 2–3, 13, 47, 79–81
socioeconomic status, 137
Socrates, 59, 75
Sonnet 147 (Shakespeare), 152
soul mates, 4, 5
stability, social, 137–140, 142, 168, 175
standard model approach, 95–97, 178
Star Trek (TV show), 84
Statistics Canada General Social Survey, 143–144
“Stay or Stray? Evidence for Alternative Mating Strategy Phenotypes in Both
Men and Women” (Wlodarski, Manning, and Dunbar), 93
Sternberg, Robert, 42–45, 47–48, 75, 109, 119
stigma, xii, 62, 99, 126, 133–135
stud, 139
Symposium (Plato), 4, 59, 75
Taylor, Timothy, 90
temporary monogamy/marriage, 93, 174–175
testosterone, 22, 28
theories of love. See Beall; dual nature; Fisher; Jankoviak; Lewis; Nozick;
Russell
Timmers, Amanda, 62, 95
traditional marriage, 124, 145
See also nuclear family
Trinity College, Cambridge, 11
Turing, Alan, 50
Twitter, 125
union view of love, 65
United Kingdom (UK)
love in Victorian England, 43–44
male homosexuality, law against, 50
marital rape, 169
provocation, as legal defense, 112–114
same-sex marriage, 109
United States
adultery laws, 134
antimiscegenation laws, 117, 173
California Penal Code, 114
female murder victims, statistics on, 115
 household income data, 127–128
marital rape, 169
Model Penal Code, 113–114
Sentencing Commission, 113–114
Supreme Court, 117, 125–126, 141, 180
vasopressin, 22, 23, 28
ventral tegmental area, 21, 31, 157
Viagra, 169
violence, 114–115, 136, 159
Wente, Margaret, 49
Western nations, social construct of love in, 48
What Do Women Want? (Bergner), 61
“What Is Love?” (song), 4
“What Is This Thing Called Love?” (song), 4
When Harry Met Sally (film), 97
White, E. B., 18
White, K. S., 18
Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (Fisher), 21, 95–96
Wikipedia, 3
wisdom, 76, 147, 148, 165
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 11
Wlodarski, Rafael, 93
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 74
women
abuse of, 125
casual sex, 62, 125
dangers of romantic love, 74
desire for children, 143–144
earning power in US, 128
faithfulness in marriage, 71–72
gender stereotypes, 41, 73, 125, 127–131, 145, 160, 173, 175
glass slipper effect, 128–129
infertile, 70
monogamy and, 63, 94–95
Nietzsche’s view of, 69–72
oppression of, 60–61, 89, 125, 130
philosophy, exclusion of women’s voices in, 68
 prehistoric female neediness, 88–90, 94, 116–117
premarital sex for, 64
as property, 112–113, 136, 161, 176
sexuality of, 61, 94–95, 169
violence and romantic relationships, 115
The World as Will and Representation (Schopenhauer), 71
“You’re Nobody ’til Somebody Loves You” (song), 141
 Credit: Jonathan Jenkins
Ichikawa

Carrie Jenkins is professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia,

Vancouver, a nationally elected Canada Research Chair, and the principal
investigator on the collaborative research project “The Nature of Love,” funded
by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She lives in
Vancouver and tweets @carriejenkins.
* This is one reason why “coming out” is important, if and when it’s safe to do so.